Cannabis: The Next Disruption
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
Thank you. Can you guys hear me OK? Awesome. I didn't realize there was a table.
00:22
I wanted to stage dive at the end, so I guess I can't do that anymore. Well, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for the introduction. My name is Lynn Baumgart. I'm the director of strategic initiatives for a company called Leafly. It's the largest cannabis information resource in the world.
00:40
And I'll be talking on the topic of cannabis, the next disruption. No one's leaving, so I assume you guys are all actually here for this talk. So that's a really great start. Sometimes I just have people walk out at this point. So then I wonder if they're in the wrong room or if I am. So you're all here, and I'm in the right room as well.
01:01
Before I hop into the presentation, I would love to ask you guys a few questions just to get a feel for the audience. So my first question, oh, you guys didn't know there would be audience participation, huh? They're all laughing in the front. Okay, my first question is,
01:21
what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the term St. John's Worthe? You're like, wait, that doesn't have anything to do with cannabis. St. John's Worthe for Germans is Johanneskraut. Anyone, any idea? Do you have any association with the term? Regulation.
01:41
Regulation, okay. I can't hear. Anti-depressant. Uh-huh, and anti-depressant. Yeah, very good. Awesome, awesome responses. Okay, different one, different question. What is the first thing that comes to your mind
02:00
when you hear the term tobacco? Yeah, great. I hear cancer. What did you say? It's radioactive. Yeah, wow, that's interesting.
02:23
I didn't know that. I should ask more questions from the audience, I guess. Okay, awesome. All right, I have one last question. At this point, you know I don't really present. I'm just going to let you guys do all the work. So, my last question is, what's the first thing that comes to mind
02:41
when you hear the term cannabis? That's the one you've been waiting for, so. What comes to mind? Disruption, nice. Anything else? Lack of memory. Lack of memory, okay.
03:03
Okay, uh-huh. Supportive treatment. Yeah, supportive treatment. Medicine. Medicine, awesome. Chill. Chill, awesome, that's true too. Okay, wow, this thing is really moving. So all of these are really good responses.
03:21
So, I'm going to get back to St. Johnsworth and tobacco in a little bit, but the topic is cannabis, so I want to talk about it a little bit more. What I just did was a mini version of what Leafly has been doing for seven years, which is we try to determine what people associate with the term cannabis.
03:41
And after seven years, here's what we came up with. This is me saying that we come up with a lot of different things. So, we have everything from words such as medicine, to hip hop, to sex,
04:00
to, in the German market, Kiffin, to ADD, ADHD, edibles, so it's really all over the place. I don't know if you guys noticed it, but there's the word Bible in there. We get Bible a lot. We don't know why. So, I still have to dig a little bit deeper into that one.
04:23
But what we figured out, when you kind of run through these thousands of terms, is that most of them can be fairly comfortably put into one of two categories. And those are the recreational category and the medical category.
04:42
So, earlier when I asked you about St. Johnsworth or Johanneskraut, which one of the two categories does it fit into? Would it be more medical or more recreational? Who thinks medical? Okay, who thinks recreational?
05:01
Okay, so overwhelming majority says medical. Next one, tobacco. Medical? Recreational. Okay, so everyone thinks it's recreational. So, the point that I'm trying to make is that it's very easy for us as a society
05:25
to decide whether these terms are medical or recreational. We know what we should do with them from an opinion perspective, from a society perspective, and from a regulatory perspective. With cannabis, we don't have that because there's really a lack of information.
05:42
We don't have consistent information on cannabis the way we do about St. Johnsworth or the way that we do about tobacco. Generally, people say tobacco causes cancer, like you said. What we hear about cannabis is really all over the place. And so, it makes it extremely difficult for us as societies to decide how we want to define this.
06:04
And that's a huge problem. Why it is a huge problem, I will answer in a couple of minutes. I want to jump into a different topic, but I'll get back to it. And before I start the next topic, I have two more questions. Who here knows someone that has consumed cannabis before?
06:28
Be honest. Okay, nice, everybody. Alright, next question. And I just want to remind everyone that, you know, audience participation is voluntary. Who here has consumed cannabis?
06:41
Alright, awesome. Okay. So that kind of aligns what we've been finding as well. You guys are an honest group. It's nice. It depends on where you are. I've asked this question before in some countries and I have like one single person saying, oh, me.
07:03
Okay, so there is, in a lot of countries, there's bureaus that actually ask their populations the question whether people consume cannabis or not. And for the purpose of this presentation, we've kind of put some of these numbers together. I do want to state that the numbers don't show how much or how often people consume.
07:23
The question that we're looking into is really, have you consumed in your lifetime? And so when you look at Europe exclusively to start with, what you learn is that the French really like their cannabis.
07:42
But the other thing that you learn is that a majority of the European countries have between 15 to 25 percent of their population say that they, at one point in their life, have tried cannabis before. And just for the point of clarity, we are looking at an age range of 15 to 64.
08:03
No children and no people over 64. So we see these fairly high consumption rates and that's pretty incredible given what we just talked about, which is that there isn't really a lot of consistent information on cannabis out there.
08:23
So you have, let's say, 25 percent of Germans consume cannabis or at least try it without really knowing what it is or what it can and should do, getting the information from friends or family. If you zoom it out a little bit and look at the global scale,
08:42
who do you guys think is the country that consumes the most cannabis in terms of lifetime consumption? What was it? Jamaica, okay. Canada, Australia, okay. USA, yeah.
09:01
Yes, USA, 51 percent of people have tried it. Again, the age group for the US is a little bit different. The people that were questioned is 18 or 21 to 64, not 15. Closely followed by Canada, right there, someone said Canada.
09:21
So if you look at this, you see mostly first world countries, a lot of European countries. A good reason for that is that, A, in those countries, there are actually bureaus that ask cannabis questions of their populations.
09:41
The other reason is that the people that are asked feel comfortable answering, right? So you guys feel comfortable saying that you've consumed cannabis before because you don't think that there are any repercussions of you saying it. So when we look at really a full global scale and we look at countries where that might not be the case, the numbers that we're getting are really inconsistent
10:03
because one of those two things is lacking. And what these high numbers mean, and by the way, so these are the top 19 countries. If you just take these top, he's like, why is she just looking at the top 19?
10:21
Why is she not choosing 20? 20 is a much better number. Okay, just to point it out, I did ask my wonderful colleague Nick who designed this to give me the top 20 countries and he came back with 19. So I said, Nick, what happened? I asked for the top 20 countries. And he said, well, you know, the slide, it got really full and people couldn't read it anymore.
10:44
But then also I had a really hard time finding a high resolution flag for Northern Ireland, which apparently was number 20, so we're stuck with the top 19. If you just look at these top 19 countries and the age groups that we looked at,
11:01
we have 322 million adults that have used cannabis. That's pretty incredible, especially given that information and that variety of opinion on it. Now, what this is also a really great indicator for is that the mindsets towards cannabis
11:20
have really been changing a lot in the last few years. So I'm just really amazed by this survey. This is the New England Journal of Medicine and they asked 71 medical professionals from 71 different countries whether they believe that cannabis should be legalized medically.
11:43
And 76% of the respondents said yes. Given that these are respondents in the medical field coming from exactly 71 different countries, I was really surprised by the response rate approving medical cannabis.
12:02
Another point might not be as surprising given the former slide is that 87% of Americans support medical cannabis and 75% of Germans support cannabis medical legalization, which is good because we did just medically legalize it.
12:24
So there's a few different reasons. There's a lot of reasons why the mindsets are changing, but a few really big ones are one, pharmaceutical and clinical perspective. So in the US there was a study done that tried to determine whether there's a correlation
12:44
between medical cannabis laws in specific states and opioid use. And what they found is that in states in which medical cannabis was legalized, deaths due to opioid overdoses became to be 25% lower
13:05
than in states where there was no medical cannabis law. But they did find strong evidence that there is a very strong correlation between medical cannabis laws and opioid consumption.
13:24
Another point is an industrial one. So if you look at hemp, it requires about 50% less space for the same amount of output. It also requires less water and less pesticides.
13:42
And then we have a really big one which are the advocacy, the advocacy for patients and families. And so what you see a lot in countries like Ireland and what you've seen in the US and in Germany is that really the families of patients are making a big difference, especially the parents of children with rare forms of epilepsy
14:03
where normal pharmaceutical drugs fail. And they're not able to legally provide their children with a drug that might potentially help them. And then the last one is the economic opportunity.
14:20
If you look at the state of Colorado, Colorado legalized cannabis completely in the year 2010. This last year, in 2016, they had $1.3 billion of tax revenues just from cannabis. That money was immediately rerouted, at least to a large portion,
14:43
to the education sector. So we have these changing mindsets, but I did mention earlier that we have a big problem because there's this lack of information and this variety of opinion as it comes to cannabis.
15:01
Now, first of all, this lack of information obviously is a big problem for patients or potential consumers. But then also, in addition to this lack of information, we have these incredibly high consumption rates. And whenever you have high consumption rates like that, regulators want to regulate the consumption.
15:22
But they're struggling with the exact same issue that everybody else is dealing with, which is a lack of inconsistent information. And what that is leading to is that we have completely different types of regulations as it comes to cannabis across the world
15:41
and sometimes even within the exact same country. So, as an example, let's look at the US. So, to give you a little bit of background, in the US, there's a federal level and state level of government, exactly like in Germany.
16:01
On the federal level, there is an agency called the Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA. The DEA classifies every controlled substance within five levels. So, a schedule one drug is the highest level of drug and controlled substance.
16:20
A schedule five is the lowest. So, for example, a schedule two drug is meth, cocaine, hydrocodone, opium, and so on. Cannabis, on the federal level, is a schedule one drug, which means it is classified as more harmful than meth and cocaine.
16:45
The other thing that that means is that, per their classification, if you schedule one drug, there is no medicinal value whatsoever, which in turn means that universities and research institutions do not get any funding if they want to do research
17:01
on the medical benefits of the substance. So, you all of a sudden have this really bad catch-22. You have a lack of information leading to certain regulation, and that regulation then forbids getting any more information because you can't do research on the substance.
17:21
But then, if you look at the reality, because we all know Americans consume cannabis, right? 51 percent. If you look at the reality, we have 24 percent of the US population living with fully legalized cannabis. That means if you're 21, you walk into a dispensary,
17:42
you buy cannabis, and you walk out. That's it. It's just like grocery shopping. And then you have 58 percent of the population that lives with medical cannabis. So, on a state level, there is an argument made, apparently, that there is medical benefits to it.
18:00
However, on the federal level, it's completely illegal for you to have cannabis. And so, what that means is that if you are in a fully legalized state, and you get stopped, and a state officer sees that you have cannabis on you,
18:21
you're fine as long as you haven't consumed it in a car or anything like that. But if a federal police officer pulls you over, that police officer has the right to arrest you because he operates under the federal law, right? And so, these are issues that come from
18:42
the type of lack of information and inconsistent opinion that we're seeing when it comes to cannabis. When it comes to Germany, we now have medical cannabis. It's legal. It's a little bit different than in other countries,
19:01
where they decided to make an exception to the narcotics law. And they put in there that if you're seriously ill, you can now get a cannabis prescription from a doctor. So, the problem is, what does seriously ill mean?
19:22
It's not defined any further in the law. And so this is, again, a really good example for some of the struggles that regulators are having, and that now doctors and patients are having, right? Because how do you hold the health insurance to paying you back for the medicine that you're getting
19:42
if, in their definition, you don't have any type of illness that's serious enough? It's not defined. Just to give you another few little examples of what different countries do. So, you have a really wide spectrum.
20:02
Canada, it's medically legal. It's going to be fully legal. It's going to be the first G7 nation that's going to have full legalization. Then you have Jamaica and Italy. In Jamaica and Italy, it's illegal, except if you're doing it for religious purposes.
20:23
So, if you happen to be in Jamaica or Italy, make sure you got your story straight. And then we have places like the Virgin Islands or Curacao, places that are really big tourist countries,
20:43
and that's illegal, but it's pretty much tolerated as long as you are a tourist. So, somehow because you're a tourist, you're now treated differently on a substance that has the same effect on different people.
21:01
And then we have countries like Brunei and Saudi Arabia where it's punishable by death. Not dealing the drug is punishable by death. Consumption of cannabis is punishable by death. So, we have at this point just about everything as it comes to regulation around the world.
21:22
And so, just to reiterate a little bit, we have really confusing information, we have varying beliefs around the world, and therefore we have inconsistent regulation, sometimes within the exact same country.
21:41
And this is where Leafly is really trying to disrupt the cycle. What we're trying to do is to get to a point where there's helpful information, at least to a certain point, people will always have a difference in opinion, but helpful, trustworthy and fact-based information
22:01
that helps patients, that helps doctors, pharmacists, and that also helps provide consistent regulation and regulation that is actually meaningful to the people that it's made for. Just to give you a little bit of detail
22:21
on how badly this information is needed, this is Leafly's traffic since we started. So, we started in 2007, and that's pretty much when the US started to really move on and some of the states started to legalize. But nothing popped up, no information base popped up, and so that's what Leafly became.
22:41
And what we saw is that whenever people had to make decisions on the ballot if they should vote yes or no, on cannabis legislation, we saw crazy bumps in traffic, right? So, we have this in 2014 with Washington and Colorado, and then we have it again in the last year
23:00
when we had several states that either medically or fully legalized. So, we now have traffic that hits over 120 million visits per year, which means people want to get information and questions answered. And what we've seen is that a lot of this information, a lot of what we're getting is people,
23:23
originally it was mostly the US, and people from the US that were looking at this, now we have people from all over the world looking. And what we realized is that in new markets like Germany, in the medical market, the questions that people are asking are completely different from the questions that we're getting in established markets
23:43
because there's different regulation around it, so they have different needs, and there's different bases of information that people already have. So, what that's led to, which is a nightmare from a branding perspective, is that we have to recreate the wheel for every market
24:00
because we want to serve the need and we want to answer the questions that that market has. So, in the US, in legalized states, you can find dispensaries, not relevant in Germany, because they're not in Germany. You can discover new products which are not available in Germany, and you can explore strains, but the strain system is one that the medical market in Germany
24:23
is not fully following, so it's therefore also not applicable to Germany. What is applicable is giving people information that they need in order to understand whether they should be purchasing cannabis or if they should go to their doctor
24:40
and if they qualify for potentially getting help through cannabis, and also to get doctors to understand how to prescribe it. I mean, we have people asking all kinds of questions. They're like, okay, can we take it and just eat it? Those are the types of questions we get from doctors. They don't understand that it needs to be heated in some shape or form.
25:03
They don't know how it needs to be consumed, so you end up creating these different sites for different markets, which is really frustrating on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's also really exciting because it allows us to provide people with the information that they need
25:20
and really disrupt the cycle of misinformation. And so the cycle of misinformation is not something that's cannabis only. Cannabis isn't the only one that has this problem. It's a problem that is a systemic issue in the society.
25:41
Fake news, right, is a huge problem of misinformation. And so what I would ask in terms of the Love Out Loud theme and the theme of this topic, which is cannabis, is that the next time that someone states some type of fact about cannabis that you don't really know if it's true or not,
26:02
please go ahead, look it up, make sure that the information that you give out is based on reality and based on facts, and put knowledge over sensationalism. So that's why we have the hashtag Just Say No. Thank you.
26:28
Thank you, Lynn. Since it's really late and since it's already 9 o'clock and we have to close down, Lynn, I'm sure, is going to be around, so if you want to have questions to her, then you can just talk to her privately,
26:42
but I think we have to close down the stage, unfortunately. Yeah, also just to let you guys know, we have a meet-up tomorrow for an hour that's just meant for people to be able to ask any questions that they want. It's from 10 till 11. I think we have a couple people out there that will be giving out flyers, so you guys know where it is, in case you're interested.