Imagine you are a 75 years old male and you have a few medical conditions like well controlled prostate cancer, diabetes, high cholesterol and your knees hurt from arthritis. Your friend says you should try cannabis for your sore knees. You also live in a small rural Manitoba town that leans religious and conservative. Where do you go to find out if cannabis for your knees is a good idea? In Ste Anne's, Manitoba, retail cannabis store owner of Supercraft, Sean Stewart and pharmacist and co-founder of Apothecare, Ajay Chahal have you covered. Sean and his knowledgeable budtenders can help you with general and non-medical cannabis questions. If your questions start swinging medical, like asking about if cannabis interactions with the prescription drugs your on, they can virtually hand you off to the pharmacists at Apothecare, based out of Ontario. The medical cannabis system in Canada isn't perfect. Physicians and other prescribers have been known to tell patients to just go to their local retail cannabis outlet and buy cannabis there. Budtenders in retail outlets are legally prohibited from giving out medical advice to their customers, and they really don't have the medical background to do so. Supercraft and Apothecare are filling that gap by providing access to a medical professional at the place where people are already going with cannabis questions.

It's a beautiful late summer day. Let's do something different. Kirk and Trevor take a stroll around their hometown of Dauphin, Manitoba. They talk cannabis, Kirk's European travel plans and greet people on the street. Our co-hosts duck into a local cannabis shop, Payson's Joint. They record stories from staff and customers. Unrehearsed, person-on-the-street stories are the best! They always go in directions you didn't expect. We hear about sex and glass pipes and if "big cannabis" is mixing different strains into one bottle. Come for a stroll.

Picture Miami. What do you see in your mind's eye? Beautiful photos of beautiful people? Instagram worthy food pics? A culture more Caribbean than American? Now imagine you meet a Chef from Miami. What does he teach you to cook? The perfect Cuban Sandwich? What is his secret ingredient? What if it is cannabis? Meet Tarik Sparks. Photographer. Chef. Cook Book writer. Listen to how he weaves serious culinary chops and precise cannabis dosing to create meals to elevate mind, body and soul.

"Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face." - Mike Tyson 

Imagine getting engaged, and within 6 months your finance gets diagnosed with cancer. Mickey from and High Society Hemp Co. doesn't have to imagine. Mickey is from Texas where cannabis is still illegal. Her husband was going through chemotherapy, surgeries and even had some ribs removed. He was in pain. The opioid pain killers sedated him too much for him to participate in his life and the lives of their children. Mickey started cooking with hemp derived cannabinoids. Her creations helped her husband's pain. Then she turned her knowledge into a business, High Society Hemp Co. The business helped with the medical bills and other expenses. Mickey continues to battle labyrinthian cannabis regulations and banal day to day challenges with love and passion. Listen to how Mickey bobs and weaves and throws punches in bunches at every obstacle that comes her way.

We first met Janna Champagne as a cannabis nurse. Since we last spoke, she has transitioned to being a Board-Certified Master Herbalist, a Professor of Integrative Medicine, a prolific academic author, and founder of an autism non-profit.  As the discussion develops, Kirk and Trevor learn the height of Janna's expertise and the depth of her passion for educating healthcare providers about the therapeutic potential of medical cannabis. Professor Champagne’s influence with the clinical application of Cannabis, within academic environments, is extremely rare as less than 2% of American universities are teaching the Endocannabinoid System.  In this episode our guest tells her cannabis story; a personal journey which is growing to be an international saga of a life being lived.

In Canada, older adults represent a fast-growing demographic of cannabis users. As part of her graduate program, PhD student Madison Maynard did a national enquiry within the USA, on how cannabis modulates the chronic pain, mental health symptoms, and sleep concerns of people between the ages of 55 and 74 years old. Although the evidence leaves questions of efficacy unanswered, the goals of the study were to examine the hypothesis that medical cannabis use will, at the daily level, predict lower pain, depression, anxiety, and improved sleep. In this episode, Kirk and Trevor discuss how her findings apply to Canada.