Colorado cannabis guru Max Montrose talks about synthetic THC and the future of medical marijuana.

You most likely have never heard of the pharmaceutical company INSYS Therapeutics. But you have almost definitely heard of their hot-seller, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid almost a hundred times stronger than heroin. Mind you, the company doesn’t peddle the cheap powder form that North American drug users are overdosing on, but instead has developed a designer spray version called Subsys.  

Over at INSYS, things are just a cunt hair away from illegal. Not only have they been been under legal fire for providing generous kickbacks to doctors for unnecessarily prescribing Subsys, but as of July 2017, they are being sued by health insurer Anthem Inc. for “fraud, negligent misrepresentation, unjust enrichment, civil conspiracy, and engaging in deceptive, unfair, and unlawful business practices.” 

Pharmaceutical companies make cheap synthetic versions of herbal medicine. That’s the sole purpose of their existence and has been since inception. I’m not exactly blowing anyone’s dick off with this information. However, in 2017, INSYS is leading the pack. And just like Subsys rode the coattails of the opioid boom, INSYS’s latest FDA-approved drug, Syndros, is doing the same with cannabis.

Syndros is the brand name for dronabinol, a man-made form of THC, the psychoactive cannabinoid found in weed. Unlike its sister pill Marinol, Syndros is the first and only liquid dronabinol on the market.

Synthetic THC is not cheap. A bottle of the lowest dosage of Marinol retails at $774, while a 30ml bottle of Syndros retails at $1,147. Both forms of dronabinol are generally prescribed to patients suffering from nausea or loss of appetite due to AIDS, cancer, or severe chronic pain. Or, if you’re like Max Montrose, president of the Trichome Institute, Colorado’s leading cannabis educators, then you’ve been prescribed dronabinol for “wasting syndrome.” Well, that and dyslexia, pasha lesions, mild scoliosis, ADHD, and being an obsessive workaholic.

I sat down with the world-renowned cannabis expert to talk synthetics, and what’s in store for the future of our favorite plant.

Are synthetic forms of THC less therapeutically effective than the cannabis plant itself?

I know for a fact that Marinol has much less therapeutic value than organic cannabis, and for a very specific reason: poly-pharmacy. “Poly” meaning many and “pharmacy” meaning drug. Cannabis has 60 to 100 cannabinoids in each flower sample, which synergistically works with over 200 types of organic terpenes [compounds found in essential oils of plants]. These two things work together to create the “entourage effect.” You need terpenes and cannabinoids together to produce the most beneficial and complete therapeutic medicine. Pharmaceutical companies are trying to take medical marijuana out of the hands of the people by saying that you must regulate it — standardize it into a one-pill-fits-all model. But cannabis does not work that way. Furthermore, THC is not half as therapeutic as the other cannabinoids in cannabis. Why they chose the one cannabinoid that produces psychoactivity — instead of non-psychoactive cannabinoids, which are therapeutic and balanced — proves that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Have you ever tried Syndros or Marinol?

I have a prescription for Marinol sitting right here on my desk. And I can tell you firsthand that it sucks.

What’s it like?

For me, Marinol is like a really cracked-out cup of coffee that makes you feel slightly dumber after you take it. There isn’t a high or a stoned feeling like you’d get from smoking an indica or sativa. Here’s the other thing: That shit costs the pharmaceutical companies pennies to produce. Chemicals, by themselves, are cheap. For example, you can buy a liquid terpene such as linalyl [a phytochemical found in bergamot and lavender] for a few dollars, whereas a quarter gram of that from the cannabis plant is $280. Pharmaceutical companies buy chemicals in massive quantities. They build those chemicals into drugs.

I’d think most people would prefer the herbal remedy, rather than the synthetic version of that same medicine.

There are herbal versions of most pharmaceutical drugs.

Yeah, and we’ve been told they don’t work as well. Smoking weed for your headache isn’t as socially acceptable as taking Tylenol.

Exactly. Natural remedies have been made inaccessible. If you have a bad cold, your chest and lungs are filled with phlegm, how were you educated on what to do? Most likely from a television commercial for Mucinex. But what you never learned is that you can walk down to an herb store and purchase an ounce of mullein [a common flowering plant] for a few dollars that will last you a lifetime. Mullein is an expectorant, just like Mucinex, so if you smoke it, it will break up all the phlegm in your chest. Doctors would prescribe plants before man invented pharmaceuticals. But there are trillions of dollars [to be made from] chemicals, illegal herbs, and an uninformed public. What’s happening with cannabis is the same thing that happened with thousands of other herbs. Cannabis is just the most popular right now.

INSYS Therapeutics’ synthetic THC, Syndros, was approved by the FDA in 2016, right at the height of attention toward cannabis legalization. That timing is a bit too perfect, don’t you think?

Since 2009, I have publicly stated that I would not be surprised if medical marijuana will be illegal in all 50 states in a much shorter time than most people want to believe.

You think?

Not marijuana, medical marijuana. I would not be surprised if cannabis followed the same evolution as alcohol in the way that medical marijuana dispensaries will [split] into medical and retail, which is happening in Colorado right now. Soon the medical cannabis will be phased out [owned by big pharma] and the medical stores will turn into legal retail stores. And I do think in the next ten years cannabis will be recreationally legal in all 50 states. Before the government legalized alcohol, what did they do? They medicalized it! You needed a prescription from a pharmacist to buy liquor during its prohibition. Prohibition turns into medicalization, which turns into decriminalization, which turns into legalization.

Remember, the federal government patented medical cannabis in 2003 under patent No. 6,630,507. It’s been almost 15 years since they’ve been putting a million people in jail per year, because cannabis provides “no medical benefits,” even though they hold the patents to the medical benefits of cannabis.

How does the government-owned patent of medical marijuana affect the future of synthetic cannabis or big pharma, as well as the cannabis industry?

Medical marijuana is very serious, but the medical marijuana industry right now, for the most part, is a joke. It’s absurd that you have to be trained, licensed, and certified to paint fingernails and cut hair but not to pretend you’re a pharmacist in the cannabis industry. We have 100,000 budtenders selling psychoactives to the public and consulting patients about their medicine who are, predominately, stoned 20-year-olds with no training. I develop training programs to solve this problem, but that’s just scratching the surface. The physicians who recommend the medical cannabis to their patients have no idea what types of products exist in the industry or how they work. Doctors are completely separated from patients when it comes to the medication they use and how they use it. We still don’t have standard ways of measuring THC or other cannabinoid potencies!

True.

It is not that absurd to imagine the federal government rescheduling cannabis to a legitimate drug schedule. The feds made Marinol a Schedule III 20 years ago, while simultaneously permitting themselves to use phytocannabinoids in pharmaceuticals, which would be a monopoly, since they own the patent rights to the medical aspects of cannabis.

Right now, cannabis is federally illegal. The fact that the federal government owns the rights to medical cannabis and that Syndros is coming out now? No duh. I’ve been waiting for this to happen.

At the risk of sounding cocky, I feel like I hold the crystal ball to the future of cannabis. But you have to understand, I have submerged 15 years of my very young life into knowing absolutely everything there is to know about this plant and its industry. Anything I have predicted has happened at the exact time and way that I said it would. Call me Nostradamus Cannabis, whatever, but I really think recreational legalization will happen.

What is your approach when it comes to the future of cannabis?

My position is that if more people know that cannabis, the flower, is more therapeutic than the synthetic version, and if they are selling cannabis flower as legal adult recreation, then I can help teach you, the consumer, which flower is best for you by way of Interpening [a method cannabis sommeliers use to determine variety and quality]. It’s not over. We just need to be more creative and smarter. I’m not afraid of anything, and I’m preparing for the future more than I’m dreading it.

Photo: Shutterstock.com / Gabriel12