Howie:

K R L t 93 9, the lake. I know who this is. Good morning. You are live on the air. Where are you? Is this you, Cody?

Cody:

This is me. Oh yeah. I’m live and direct sitting here in beautiful South Lake Tahoe.

Howie:

Oh, man. Sounds like you’re mobile. Are you out and about? No,

Cody:

I’m actually, I’m, I’m here at the house. Just getting the day going, man, what a beautiful day we got. Oh my

Howie:

God. All time. Gorgeous. Did you happen to catch the sunrise yesterday? Today was okay, but yesterday was literally on fire. It was just gorgeous colors. That might’ve been too early for you to get up though.

Cody:

Yeah, I usually try not to catch the sunrise if I can help it.

Howie:

It’s funny. Hey, it’s really weird. Before I did this gig, man, I wouldn’t get up to about 10, 10 o’clock easily. So it was weird to readjust the clock. I still consider myself kind of a night owl, even though technically I’m up at three 30 in the morning.

Cody:

Yeah, no, I used to be a snow maker when I started, when I moved to Tahoe and I worked permanent graveyard, so it was like a midnight to 8:00 AM shift and yeah, your human clock. It’s so interesting how our body and mind adjusts the time or however we flow within the day. But I’ll never forget those years, man. I got to see sunrise pretty much every day from the top of stage coach or top of the sky chair, and unbelievable being able to join to have the day be part of Sunrise. I don’t know, it was just an amazing time in life. I’ll never forget,

Howie:

I never even asked you this, and I don’t know if it’s an internal clock thing or what, but in the 20, God, 20 years maybe almost 21, doing this radio show, I’ve never used an alarm clock or any type of a apparatus strapped to my wrist or anything like that. It was always internal, just like got to get up right now. It’s just really weird.

Cody:

It’s so true. You know what? Even when I’m not on the full routine of waking up, if I have a flight to catch, I find myself doing that same thing. I’ll literally wake up like three minutes before the alarm would’ve went off. It’s amazing, man. Our mind is such an amazing thing, and I was actually, I was reading some news this morning and thinking of the mind, and right now we have a bill to allow for psychedelics essentially to be used for medical abilities more or less, and it’s on Newsom’s desk. And he just said that he sees the incredible healing powers of psychedelics, but he’s not sure whether or not he will sign this bill. And a lot of things that psychedelics as well as cannabis can provide is kind of unlocking, or let’s say unchaining the brain, and I’m just thinking about this because of just how powerful our human mind is and how much we need it to function in a good way and to not be chained down by the things in life. And so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not he signs this Bill. Oregon has done this. Colorado has also done this, so it’s kind of funny for California to be third in something, but I think he may, and it’ll be a very interesting thing to see if he does.

Howie:

Okay. Two things. A, he’s smart to sign off on it. He’s going to be debating DeSantis next month or in November. So anything that helps open the mind is going to be good. You never know whose mind’s going to be closed, and I’ll just leave it at that. And then also, there was a study that came out about anxiety. There’s more and more, I just saw it yesterday on the news, a rise in anxiety with people going in for one thing and realizing that they’ve been diagnosed with anxiety, not even knowing it when they first went in to see a counselor, a therapist, or someone who prescribes some type of prescription drugs to help with their ailment. And I thought that was an interesting parallel.

Cody:

Yeah, it absolutely is. And I mean anxiety, you see through so many people. I mean, it’s kind of rampant, I would say in a certain sense these days. And definitely there’s not, when you look at psychoactive drugs that are prescribed, that are synthetically made, there’s not a whole lot of good options. And if you look at the side effects of things that a lot of those psychoactive drugs do, it doesn’t put you in a better place than when you went in the doctor’s office for mental health and anxiety in these things. We need to open up the toolbox for doctors and psychologists and people to have more useful tools. And at the lowest level, I would say, of people dealing with psychological issues, cannabis is a huge help for many of those people, but for people that are at a much higher level of psychological need, psychedelics without a doubt have a major benefit.

And so it’ll be cool to see whether or not the Governor Newsom signs this bill. And a lot of people, different people have fear of, oh, well, this is just a next step of drug reform and all of these things. Well, it really is, and it’s also what we need for our human people and our society to be a better place, is to allow doctors to have access to every plant and all of the fungi and everything that is available for human people to heal. So I think it could be a great thing and we’ll see. Well,

Howie:

I think given the time that it has elapsed since, I’m just going to say, well, actually I guess literally the late fifties, but more the sixties, it seems like it was more prevalent, but it’s so much monitored now as far as, I mean, it seemed like a crapshoot, I would think at the sixties back at the time of Timothy Leary with L S D and mind bending drugs and whatnot. You don’t know which one, if you were, get a good one, if you’re going to get good acid or whatnot. But I would think now that everything is so regulated that scientifically they know more exactly what’s in a particular tablet or whichever way you take it, that it could be more regulated. Maybe we’ve come so far. Maybe Newsome was sign off on that because we’ve advanced. It’s not as risky as it used to be, maybe.

Cody:

Yeah, most definitely. And the thing is, even when we look at L S D and Albert Hoffman designed that and took the first hit of L S D, I think it was April 19th, 1942. And we knew, I mean, he just created this drug and knew nothing about it, but he knew he changed the world the second he did it. And then Timothy Leary in the sixties is kind of who brings that out, but wants to just give asset to everybody in the world. He knew that it would change the human mind and human people, but we never looked at it through the lens of actual medicine until recently. And what we’ve found is that we don’t need a hundred micrograms of L S D, we need a thousandth to even a 10000th of a microgram. And when you use it in a micro dose like that, it doesn’t necessarily even give you what we would think of a psychedelic trip.

It really just kind of opens your mind and changes the lens of the day a little bit. And for somebody that is having, whether we call it anxiety or even at the more extreme schizophrenia and kind of those types of things, we need to open up this tool chest for the psychologist. And look, mental health is, in my opinion, probably the biggest health crisis because we don’t have any solutions for it. So continuing to allow the Controlled substance act and these things to basically impede on the ability for doctors to provide medicine and mental health is not right. And so that’s what this bill around allowing psilocybin for medical use is on his desk. And let’s hope he signs it. Again, we’ve got to realize in our country, we have the ability to right wrongs and to correct things as we move forward and in medicine as well as engineering and every other thing. There’s a lot of things that we know were wrong then, and we can right them now. And so we’ve got to do that and hopefully, yeah, this is on the path to it,

Howie:

Man. I sure hope. There’s a couple of people I want to get on that are mental health experts. There’s one lady, I forgot her name. She was listening to the show. She’s like the mental health person for El Dorado County, and she signs off on a lot of things for yay or nay, and I guess she heard me ranting about something. Oh, I know what it was. I think I was ranting about, I don’t want to see mental health become such a broad stroke where people use it as an excuse. I admit, even as a comic, I’ve used it on stage saying, oh yeah, this guy killed somebody and blah, blah, blah. And then he claimed mental health, but he had the wear for out to get a weapon to go after someone and shoot them. I want to know where you draw the line where it’s just some person being an a-hole that wants to kill somebody and then blaming it on something else.

So it’s a fine line. I’m finding out, and it might be interesting to get that lady on from mental health and also talk about what remedies is she signing off on if it’s got so far with Newsome being able to sign off on these different type of maybe psychedelic drugs, maybe there is some improvement that could happen and not just, I don’t want to make a joke about it, but let’s be honest, people won’t say it of course, because they’ll get in trouble. But there’s a lot of people out there that will use that as something to lean on to justify their whacked out behavior.

Cody:

Yeah, no, and I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, we used to always before this, let’s face it, this mental health thing, yes, it’s probably more rampant than it has been ever. But before my time, I’ve always heard when Ronald Reagan closed all the loony bins in California, and that’s really where you started to see this mental health crisis pour out onto our streets. And then it’s just exponentially gotten worse and worse over time. But it’s not like we haven’t, I mean, everybody always used to say, oh, just plead insanity. If you go murder somebody, you get off because you plead insanity. And that’s insane, right? I mean, that’s not right. But there is a real element of somebody is mentally insane. Well, hello. That’s why they should be in a facility locked away from the rest of us. But that’s not the reality of today.

And so what are the tools and things that we can try to use to bring people to a better perspective? Let them look through a different lens basically. And again, I think psychedelics do allow for that. Now, the fact is a doctor, especially one that’s employed by any government health agency, even after Newsom signs, this bill is probably going to have a real hard time, especially publicly talking about this, because you’re still going to have federal law, and it’ll be decades most likely before we get the federal law to shift. And so doctors find themselves in a very difficult place based on their medical license and the fact that, yeah, the federal government could choose to come down on them. They never did through cannabis. They never yanked, well, I shouldn’t say that, but Molly Fry, they did go after her medical license. But anyways, it’s unlikely.

And the thing is that fear is what allows the fear to exist and allows doctors to not want to study it, research it, administer it, and that’s somewhat a problem. But at the same point, just seeing the policy shift and having these kind of bills on a governor’s desk is huge. And again, I think that we have to allow the brightest and the people that we put in charge of our medical society to have access to all forms of medicine that they need to study. And again, this did start in a way with the cannabis movement of really understanding that, look, we’ve advanced in medicine in the last four or five decades, but we didn’t use the most useful plant to make medicine in all of that medical research. But let’s stop doing that now and let’s start using that plant. And the same thing falls with the psychedelic drugs. Absolutely,

Howie:

Man, you know what? There are two things that would be really perfect if they paralleled one another. And you mentioned it before to downsize because I still can’t wrap it around my head, that marijuana is still, you said it was in different tiers like one, two, and three, and marijuana’s up there with really, really hard addicting kind of drugs. They need to bring that level down so it’s not a considered a felony or something up there with heroin or whatever. And then B, it’d be nice because of the inroads that have been done finding out that marijuana is great for medicinal purposes, that they fast track like what’s on the governor’s desk to go sign off on that too and start advancing through science to find out exactly how that could be beneficial down the road, just like cannabis was proven for medicinal purposes.

Cody:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And many people don’t realize the Controlled Substance Act, Nixon 1973, they create this controlled substance act and the scheduling of it. And so yes, schedule one, schedule two, schedule three. And most people don’t realize cannabis is a schedule one next to heroin. I know that. Crazy pcp. It’s crazy. Tell us all of these crazy drugs and then guess what? Cocaine is a Schedule two. And the reason is, is because what schedule one says is that anything created in this schedule schedule one of a drug has no research or medicinal value, and it is not allowed to be administered in pharmacies, hospitals, any of that. And cannabis lives on that. While schedule two has medicinal value but needs great control and is not allowed to be sold over, not even sold over the counter, you’re not even allowed to prescribe it to a patient.

You can only use it in a hospital. So cocaine is a schedule two, because cocaine is used every day in anesthesia to wake people up out of surgery or out of things. And so cocaine is used in a hospital almost all of the time. So as most people know that the effects and things of cocaine, to think that cocaine is a Schedule two and cannabis is a schedule one, shows you how bad this policy needs to be reformed. And yeah, I think that cannabis, well, it’s a fact. Cannabis is what really opens the conversation of policy reform for the Controlled Ubstance Act. And it’s needed broadly, I mean cannabis without a doubt, but there’s other drugs on that schedule one list including psilocybin, L S D, that also need to be adjusted, reformed, and rescheduled. Now, exciting news, and I think I talked about this at our last meeting, is that cannabis was just referred to be Schedule three by the F D A.

Now in the cannabis industry, there’s without a doubt, some fear that if Biden decides to move it to a Schedule three, that’ll mean that only places like Walgreens and c v s that have licenses by the federal government to sell schedule threes are then going to be able to be the only ones allowed to sell cannabis. That’s a paranoia and a fear that to me, I don’t really believe in because look, it was a schedule one and the feds told us we couldn’t do it, and we’ve been doing it here for 15 years. So I’m not too worried about what the F FDA is going to do now if it’s a schedule three, but there is a lot of fear to me, it’s moving the needle, and we’ve never had that type of movement at the federal level. So we’ll be okay. So anyways, sorry to ramble, but yeah, that was good stuff. A lot going on in this world of wild cannabis politics.

Howie:

Now, what about speakers that are coming? Because I always find that really fascinating when you bring in these different guest speakers that are just as knowledgeable as you are because they’ve created this product that you’re like a retail outlet, you’re selling it their stuff as well too. It’s almost like it’s, Hey, can I buy that on consignment? So it’d be like to try it out, but you’ve got some really great speakers that are very knowledgeable about what they create, and I always feel better when I get to hear the background of what it is that they’ve made and they’ve already tested it themselves.

Cody:

Absolutely. No, and that’s cool is I have a broad amount of cannabis expertise and things, but yeah, when you come in and see these brands and they’re in our store doing a demo, you really get to find knowledge about their individual product, their methodology of how they cultivate, and really kind of get to feel who they are as people. A lot of the brands that we carry are still from small farmers that have it and come from a real story and a real background. So it’s really cool to come and see those people. So yeah, this week we’ve got up north. Up north is one of the largest brands of the high quality flower cannabis that we provide. They’re going to be in store this week on Sunday from 12 to three. Nice. So yeah, definitely come check them out. And it’s been, the cannabis industry’s kind of going through a transition, and so we haven’t had as many demos, but we’re really doing our best to have demos and as well Tahoe Wellness.

We do a lot that I think a lot of people don’t understand as far as our compassion programs, the medicine that we provide for people that don’t have an income to be able to afford it themselves. We have programs that are for our love program, that are for people that are terminally ill, that are literally at the end of life. We have a program that provides them almost an unlimited amount of medicine at their own discretion. So those are programs that we want people to know about. And please, if there’s a need for anybody in the community that needs those programs, please come to Tahoe Wellness. We’ve been providing those since the day we opened, and we always will. But I feel sometimes that maybe people don’t know that that’s there as a resource and we want them, everybody to know that

Howie:

We need to talk about that more often. That’s a great option. That’s really good to know you make so anyone, regardless of financial needs or whatnot, has access to something to help their quality of life. That’s a really cool thing that you’re doing. That’s really neat.

Cody:

Absolutely. Yeah, no, it’s a good thing and we all got to give and do what we can to help the world be a better place. That’s my attitude.

Howie:

Oh, man. You know what? I feel you going through a daily transformation every time we chat.

Cody:

That’s right. It definitely starts with a cup of coffee and a nice SPL in the morning.

Howie:

Oh man. Hey Cody, this is great. I’m glad I forgot you didn’t have a city council meeting until later on today, so thanks for the extra time. That was very nice.

Cody:

Yeah, man, that’s always good. And yeah, we’ll have to come see you soon. I will actually be out next week, but I will do my very best to call in.

Howie:

Yeah, if you can, that’d be great, because getting that call when you were in overseas in Asia, that was amazing. That was great.

Cody:

Nice. Yes, I’ll definitely be on time and we’ll talk next week, Howie.

Howie:

Alright, man. Be safe though. Chat with you soon. Love you, Cody.

Cody:

Yep, love you too. All right. Have a good day. Bye.