Herbalists vs. Big Industry
Hello Reader,
In the past week I've addressed some of the myths that prevent people from making their own medicine with cannabis – myths like "it's too complicated to make at home".
Students in my program make over 25 ounces of high-quality, reliable, ethically produced medicine – and they can even use flowers that we grew right here at Heartstone.
(For context, same same amount of medicine from a dispensary could cost someone a range of $1875 to $2500 !!!)
Now, it's story time...
- The backstory of this project
- The current state of things (legal update)
- Industry lies and product labeling
- Making your own medicine
Herbalists vs. Cannabis Industry
This project is about keeping this master plant accessible for healers, medicine makers, small farmers, and people who need the healing it can offer.
The alternative is a cannabis industry that mistreats the farmers, the earth, and this plant. It enables them to mislead people and mark up prices to ever increase their profits.
The adventure has been long and winding, taking me down unexpected paths I could’ve never seen until I arrived at their trailheads.
One path led to teaching all over the country, another to my online Cannabis classes and finally the two plus years of writing my book.
Along the way I’ve met incredibly generous folks who embody the abundant paradigm we are struggling to venture into.
Abundance and generosity have been my trail markers along the way helping me to find our community. Is this person willing to share? Knowledge? Lessons learned? Resources such as seeds or clones?
One of the many wounds cannabis is here to heal is our relationship with generosity and greed.
Very few plants we’ve encountered have the charge and stigma cannabis carries with her. We are slowly coming out of an 80 year prohibition, leaving incarceration, lost livelihood, and untold suffering.
All this because of a healing plant.
Here is the current status of things:
- Although the legality of the plant is changing, “hemp”, which is cannabis with a THC content of less than 0.3%, is legal federally.
- Hemp is not legal at the state level in all 50 states. Idaho, South Dakota, and Nebraska still have a prohibition on “hemp”
- Cannabis with higher than 0.3% THC is still not legal federally, and the states have different levels of legality affecting who can access and how the medicine is sold.
Even with the legal hemp across the states, big banking has its own form of regulation/prohibition. In the past, anyone wanting to educate or sell legal hemp is shut down by online payment processors such as paypal, stripe and square.
Of course if you are a BIG business selling CBD products, you aren’t policed the same way as the little guy.
A friend and colleague had their entire online teaching platform shut down for months when she advertised a class I was teaching for her on the endocannabinoid system and cannabis. It is for this reason you will not see any mention of cannabis for courses I offer on my website, but rather, “the plant”.
Although hemp flowers are now federally legal, the FDA says you cannot make or sell any products a person would take internally. As of this writing high CBD cannabis/hemp extracts do not fall under the dietary supplements but under the drug category.
Yes, everyone and their brother sell it, everywhere, including your local quick mart, but "technically" it is illegal.
Why all this information?
Because you have the right to know what’s really true so you can make informed decisions.
Because you have the right to make your own medicine.
Mass produced CBD: Problems and Solutions
Unlike at home or small scale medicine making, the industrial process is all about efficiency and compromise.
This has consequences on potency, quality, effects, health benefits... but corporations use slick branding to cover it up and paint a pretty picture.
Here’s what you won’t get from reading the labels on CBD products:
- The process of extracting constituents from cannabis is not difficult.
- It is your birthright to make medicine and care for yourself and your family.
- We have the opportunity to change the lives of the farmers as well.
- You can make your own high-CBD cannabis medicine
Let’s go into each of these for a moment.
It's important.
The process of extracting constituents is not difficult.
If you’ve been making tinctures or infused oils, you know how to do it already. There’s one additional step, which is heating the flowers to remove the acids and transform them into active cannabinoids. This has the fancy name of decarboxylation.
If you know how to spread flowers on a cookie sheet, regulate the temperature of your oven to 250 degrees fahrenheit, and remove after 80 minutes, you can do this fancy extra step. No PhD required.
It is your birthright to make medicine and care for yourself and your family.
There’s a lot of hype out there about different processes for extraction, sometimes with misleading intentions.
It has been and will continue to be my mission to help folks tease out the relevant information, to learn the questions to ask so you can get a good quality medicine – all the while helping you make informed decisions when you spend your hard earned money.
We have the opportunity to change the lives of the farmers as well.
Historically the people tending the plants, doing the back breaking work, sweating it out in the field, worrying about the weather and working long hard days, are the people who make the least in the present time capitalist top down model.
They are paid pennies per hour while each subsequent part of the “supply chain” makes exponentially more money so that by the time the medicine arrives to you, you’re paying $75-100/ounce on something the farmer was paid 1-2 dollars for.
I’m not making these numbers up. These are real numbers.
So how do we change this?
You know the answers, we’ve started to do this with our food with CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture), and we can do this with medicine too.
Here’s a few other ideas:
- Buy local, from the farmer and pay them a fair price for their flowers.
- Buy local, from the farmer who makes medicine from their flowers.
- Buy local, from a medicine maker and pay them a fair price for their medicine, so they can pay the farmer a fair price. Ask them if they are paying a fair price for the flowers they use.
You can make your own high-CBD cannabis medicine
I make medicine, I know how much flowers cost in blood, sweat and tears to grow on a small scale like I’ve chosen to pursue, and on a large industrial agricultural farm (that I have not decided to pursue).
There’s a difference in paying people a living wage to hand harvest and process the flowers and utilizing machinery to cut down and chop up the flowers. All of it comes at an expense, in human energy, fossil fuels, time, and quality of the plant material at the end.
So with the mindset of “everyone eats” I’ve created what I’m calling “The Full Monty” medicine making package – our chance to change the current top down model.
We’ve spent 250 people hours just in the harvesting, drying, curing and processing of the flowers from our land. We’ve harvested more than we will need for our own needs, and so would like to send off “the girls” to folks like you, the people of my email list (you won’t see this promoted on social media).
Click here to read more and enroll in the Full Monty.
So here are the long-awaited details.
What's Included in “The Full Monty”
- Online video course: instant access once you purchase the package and access forever! Over four hours of the medicine making class filmed live with students. The video class will include all the information for you to make your own medicine.
- My “free gift” to the students who register for the full monty package ~ 4 ounces of my organically grown, sung to, loved on, hand harvested, high-CBD and legally compliant, dried, smokeable grade, cannabis flowers. (That was a lot of words!)
- 5 ml jar to send in your finished product for testing.
- A lab coupon to send in your sample for testing (free of charge. You just pay shipping)
- 3 live Q & A sessions scheduled within a month to help you make your medicine this year
- A private forum: An invitation to the Medicine Making Mighty Network. Our own platform to interact, share pictures, thoughts and information (Our very own facebook, without big brother watching, if you will.).
All this shipped directly to you by December 6th
For just $489.
I made this program for people like you who will bring these medicine making traditions into the future, keeping the whole-person, whole-plant approach alive and well.
https://heartstone-online.teachable.com/p/the-package/
Okay, whew!
Thanks for reading.
Tammi
P.S. Did you want to see the free preview videos? Expand the curriculum on the program page to view. They're available throughout the week.