On this Cannacurio episode, Ed and Lou Rinaldi, a cannabis patient advocate, discuss how he got his start in this very public advocacy role, the truth about cannabis testing and the expose that blew the lid off of testing lab standards, the state of movement in Connecticut, and so much more!
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Cannacurio Podcast Episode 58 Transcript
Ed Keating
Welcome to the Cannacurio Podcast powered by Cannabiz Media. I’m your host Ed Keating, and on today’s show, we’re joined by Lou Rinaldi, a Connecticut patient advocate. So Lou, welcome to Cannacurio.
Lou Rinaldi
Thanks, Ed. It’s great to be here. I appreciate you having me on.
Ed Keating
Absolutely. So, tell us a little bit about your background because you know, this isn’t like any paid gig. I mean, this is something that you’re, you’re taking a lot of time to, to, to step into this very sort of public role.
Lou Rinaldi
Yeah. So cannabis has been part of my life since my my teenage years, like I think a lot of folks. It has come in and out of my life at various times. My relationship with the plant has evolved over time – but fast forward to 2019, I became a medical patient in the state of Connecticut and I had just recently completed a certificate program at UC Berkeley around data science and data analysis. And whenever I learn a new skill, especially a technology skill, my instinct is to try to put that into practical application with something that actually interests me. And in this case, having recently become a patient, I was made aware that there’s a public data portal run by the state of Connecticut that included some cannabis data. So I said, why not try to apply what I’ve just learned, spent, you know, a year studying this to this cannabis data and see what stories the data can tell.
Ed Keating
Ya.
Lou Rinaldi
And you know, at first it was some some pretty basic stuff, you know, terpenes, THC it was, it was a challenge to navigate the strain names which I think we’ll touch on a little bit later. But you know, it, the more that I explored the data that was available, the more that it became evident to me what was missing from the data sets. Especially once I had an opportunity to look at a laboratory certificate of analysis for a product I had purchased in the program. And I’m comparing what I’m seeing on this certificate of analysis with what I’m seeing in the data portal and they’re not lining up. I’m not seeing anything about microbial testing. I’m not seeing anything about heavy metals. So I began asking questions. I began working directly with the Department of Consumer Protection to try and get some of these questions answered. And also, you know, talking with, the staff at the dispensary that I was registered to at the time, and what I learned over a period of some very frustrating months, was that no one was really interested in answering these questions or pursuing this line of inquiry whatsoever?
Ed Keating
So, Lou for the testing that you were able to look at, that’s really the source of truth, right? That’s coming from the lab. And that is, you know, real hard data that’s coming from somebody who’s tested that plant, right?
Lou Rinaldi
In theory. Yes. So, so if you were to read the regulatory guidelines that were published at the time by the state, There’s a process for by which sampling occurs, how the sample is collected, how the sample is transported to the laboratory. What types of adulteration are allowable for that sample? Should it fail a test, what process gets triggered if a failure should occur? And that, that actually has changed in the interim from the time that I first became a patient until today, the rules of the road in that sense have evolved. But at the time, it was basically, you know, the sample goes in, it gets analyzed, the lab generates the certificate, and the data, some of the data from that certificate ends up in the public data portal.
Ed Keating
I see, I see.
Lou Rinaldi
So one of the things that I did, once I started getting the runaround, I started getting a lot of deflection and misdirection in terms of my line of inquiry, there. I familiarized myself with the State’s Freedom of Information Commission and learned about some of the levers that can be pulled there in terms of getting all of this data entered into the portal, not just the subset that they were making available. And I did have some success there. I was able to get all of those other types of data that I mentioned added to the portal by default, it’s not done in the cleanest way. They essentially take a scan of the PDF of that certificate of analysis and make it available, you know, directly in the portal. And of course, there are tools to scrape that and you know, extract that data automatically, but it’s not, you know, it doesn’t lend itself immediately to rigorous analysis like a lot of data sets, it requires a lot of cleaning and massaging to get it ready for, for utilization.
Ed Keating
You’re speaking our language. We’re tracking 100 and 50 or so regulators worldwide to totally with you on that.
Lou Rinaldi
But I can’t even imagine doing it at scale. It was hard enough doing it for one state. So, and one of the things that I that occurred after this expansion of the data that was made available was what I refer to as sort of the opening of my own personal Pandora’s box. Which in in retrospect, part of me wishes it never happened because it ended up bringing me a lot of hardship down the road. What I mean, you know, it might sound melodramatic, but what I mean by that is I started noticing that certain certificates of analysis for a given product were listing the product as having passed the tests. But the measurements that were on that certificate exceeded what was published at the time in terms of actionable thresholds or allowable limits and…
Ed Keating
And Lou, one point on that, you know, I’m not nearly as familiar with any of the testing data as you are. But I remember last year, there was an issue where each testing lab had different thresholds back when we had two testing labs in the state. And it was brought to the public’s attention maybe by you. I don’t know who, but it was like, how can we have one being, you know, 1000 parts per million and another one being, you know, 10,000 or it was a big difference?
Lou Rinaldi
Yes, you’re absolutely right, Ed. And that actually is a nice segue into the next chapter of the story, which is OK. Now that I figured this out, what do I do with it? You know, I obviously I, one thing that I have remained steady with over the years is I do try to jump through the official hoops of providing feedback to the regulator and to the state. Even though my expectation of results, there is very low, almost non-existent, I still, I don’t want to get accused of you know, going off the rails and not following process. So I did bring it to their attention. Obviously, nothing happened. And at that point, I began investigating other avenues for, you know, what can I do with this? Because this is where I started to really internalize the modality of, I’m a patient doing this for other patients, my only goal in all of this is to improve patient outcomes. I would want someone to tell me this. If another patient knew this information, I would appreciate if they told it to me so that I can educate myself, I can make a more informed decision about the products that I’m sourcing, where I’m sourcing from, what I’m ingesting what’s going into my body, how you know what the level of efficacy can be expected to be those sorts of things. So I had my eye on a few journalists in the state, investigative journalists who appeared unafraid to speak truth to power. And one of them, a reporter by the name of Ginny Monk, who at the time was writing for Hearst Connecticut Media Group. She’s now on a different beat. She’s covering housing issues and doing a wonderful job exposing a lot of inequities in in the housing situation in the state. But at the time, I was able to connect with her and she was really the first and only person who, who took me seriously who gave me the time of day when I presented this evidence. She, she ran with it, and in December of 2021 after years of working on this and, and, you know, more recently collaborating with Ginny, we published, we published sort of a, an expose on, on the whole situation which described what you just talked about how the one lab has one standard, the other lab has another standard. And the way that the standards had been changed was through secretive private emails between the lab director and one of the drug control agents at DCP. It was never communicated to the board of physicians for the medical program. It was, it was never socialized with the patient community. It was never published anywhere in a publicly consumable fashion. So and when I foiled the, the email that was authorizing the change it made reference to, well, we have this upcoming audit and it would be really great if, you know, we could move the needle in this direction so that we don’t get dinged on, you know, XY or Z.
Ed Keating
Oh brother, wow…
Lou Rinaldi
So, yeah, so that’s when it really the horse was out of the barn at that point. And, you know, it, it’s tough and I tried talking to the directors of both laboratories at around that time. One of them, one of them didn’t even live in the state at the time, and I had a, a lengthy phone call during which he incriminated himself several times and basically said that you know, they, they can really do what they want because of the way that, you know, the, the laws written, the regs are written, that sort of thing. So, a big nasty mess and what this all led to was in the 2022 legislative session. It was formally raised and revisited by the state legislature to say, listen, we’ve become aware of this disparity in laboratory testing standards for cannabis. We would like to normalize and standardize and you know, there was a public feedback process. Folks were allowed to submit public testimony and then there ended up being, a closed-door hearing during which the state brought in an expert, as they deemed it from a company called Medicinal Genomics who that, that’s a whole another episode there. But basically, the decision was made to split the difference, of the increase that had been made. So previously, the limit, the action limit for total yeast and mold count was 10,000 colony-forming units per gram. Those private emails that whole debacle had raised it to 1 million units per gram. So, you know, multiple orders of magnitude, and where the state ultimately landed was at 100,000. And both labs have since adopted that standard. My testimony at the time pointed out that other medical markets, such as Michigan still have it at 10,000. And even recreational markets such as Massachusetts have a lower limit than that. So my voice didn’t really get heard at that time, you know, they had, they brought it, the state brought in their ringer, they, they got done what they wanted to get done to placate the four licensed producers and the outcomes that they were looking for. But at the very least it raised, you know, the idea that, wow, there is some fallibility here, there is something that warrants a little bit more of scrutiny than what had previously been going on. Now, if you listen to, if you listen to anyone, any elected official talk about the medical program in particular, you’ll always hear them talk about how Connecticut is the gold standard, the gold star for the nation in terms of our medical program. And I get it because they’re only absorbing information that’s presented to them in, in memo form and you know, in briefing form, and they just have to sort of take what they’re given as gospel. My goal through all of this was to start to pull back the curtain a little bit on that and expose some of the corruption, some of the malfeasance that was going on and, still is going on in my opinion.
Ed Keating
So, so just, just want to jump in there. You know, you’ve talked about other states which I think is important. But I’m curious from a, from like an advocacy standpoint, what is the state of that movement here in Connecticut? Like, I know in a lot of states when a new program comes in, which happened, you know, almost a decade ago in Connecticut, you had some trade associations or, you know, that would, you know, help that happen, they’d raise funds, et cetera. And then I think they sort of depart the state, but like marijuana policy project and those groups. But what about after that? Like, are there other people like you lou here in Connecticut that our, our colleagues are, you know, you sort of stuck in, in a lone wolf situation in terms of, you know, being an advocate in the state for patients.
Lou Rinaldi
Well, that is a loaded question, Ed. And it’s fine, I’ll run with it. I’ll definitely run with it. So, before I launch into that, you mentioned the marijuana policy project, it is my belief that lobbyists from the marijuana policy project sold the state legislators in Connecticut, a bill of goods in terms of revenue projections around cannabis. And this is gonna be a golden goose for the state. If you just let us set the parameters, the way that we envision, you, let us do things the way that we want to get done. You’ll be swimming in revenue. And now, you know, we see the adult-use market launched in January of this year 2023 and the return the receipts are underperforming those projections by more than 50% year to date. So I think at some point, the other shoe is going to drop. Even those legislators who really truly do only care about the revenue aspect of things. They’re gonna look at this and say, hey, you told us one thing we gave you the benefit of the doubt. We’ve been hearing a lot of pushback from small craft producers, locals in-state folks. And now we’re actually gonna start giving them some, some credence because we’re just not seeing the revenue that you promised.
Ed Keating
It makes me think of what happened in Georgia where suddenly they said, you know, we have this program, we have 50,000 patients signed up and then they’re like, oops, wait a minute, there’s only 14,000 and that was the state that made the mistake, but it has licensing implications too there because they’re supposed to set the number of stores based on the population.
Lou Rinaldi
But that’s right. And, and, this is definitely a template that’s been deployed in Connecticut in terms of regulatory capture. This is not unique to Connecticut. This is, is actually quite common on the eastern seaboard. And it’s, it’s a template that originated in Illinois. But that’s kind of a tangential conversation back to your question about what, what is the picture look like for advocacy here in Connecticut. I think the most diplomatic way for me to answer that question is to say it comes down to me, it comes down to a question, of primary motivators. As I said earlier, my only motivation and all this, I’m not in the cannabis industry. I don’t work in cannabis. I don’t make a dime from anything cannabis related. I’m just a patient who got curious and stumbled upon some things and wanted to make that information available and still am working to make a lot of that information available and to raise awareness and education around some of these things that I’ve discovered. I don’t necessarily think that description can be applied to anyone else in the state who has proclaimed themselves a cannabis advocate. There’s a profit motive in almost every instance, there’s a hustle being protected, there’s some sort of ulterior motive involved. They may care deeply and passionately about the plant. But you know, they’re not simply looking to improve outcomes for patients. They’ve got some other angle and I have not made a lot of friends because of the way that I approach this. And you know, I’m a believer in, in, in truth and I’m a systems thinker and I believe in solving for root cause and a lot of the time that mindset reveals and exposes things that folks would rather keep, you know, behind the curtain. So I have found it more effective to operate as a lone wolf, particularly in this year’s legislative session. I think a collaborative approach would have delayed the outcomes that I was able to achieve. And it’s unfortunate too because like I said, I do think a lot of folks have their, at least their heart in the right place. But there’s a sense of desperation in the state right now from folks who are in cannabis. There’s a sense of, we don’t know what the long-term picture is going to be. We don’t know what the federal picture is going to shake out as, and we see the only ones finding any degree of success right now in the state are the MSOs, you know, the multi-state operators, the out-of-state corporations who control 100% of the medical and the adult-use market in Connecticut. And there are a grand total of four of them. Not counting the provisionally licensed ones who I don’t believe are operational at this point. But, the folks who are doing the cannabis advocacy, they tend to be willing to partner with those entities whereas I’m not, I, I just do what I do. I do it myself and I put the information out there. What folks choose to do with that information is up to them. I’m simply trying to provide it to democratize it. Information wants to be free and I’m I’m just trying to free it.
Ed Keating
So how is the landscape changing now? Because, you know, as you referenced, you know, back in January, you know, 10 months ago, almost to the day Connecticut rolls out adult-use had been in the works for a while. So before you had a population, let’s say that you represented that were patients. Now, some may have been using it more as just a way to get adult use into their house versus people who are real patients. But now suddenly there’s a much broader, more diluted cohort in terms of people who just want to, you know, have cannabis. What kind of challenges does that pose for you or, or is it an opportunity as well? I don’t know because III I see them as distinct sets of users, consumers, et cetera patients.
Lou Rinaldi
It’s a real paradox ed because they are absolutely distinct, but they are, you know, inextricably linked at the same time. The template that I mentioned earlier has always been use a medical market as a precursor to a rollout of adult use and then sunset the medical market so that all of the dollars flowing into cannabis are taxable. So that will always exist as you know, the the medical side of things is always the the carpet that gets rolled out. So how have things changed? Well, when adult use rolled out, it was largely subject to the same parameters as the medical market. One of the things I mentioned earlier was the strain names, Connecticut is the only legal state in the nation where the actual strain names of a given product are not included on the product label. At least they were not for adult use, at the outset, same as medical instead of lemon skunk. You get lexicon or something like that. You get these weird like pseudo pharmac PSE-sounding names. And the whole reason that that was done in my opinion was to placate the prohibitionist elements and sort of the old money of Connecticut who didn’t want cannabis, you know, anywhere around here at all in any sort of legal capacity. So that was to, you know, part of this pharmaceutical facade that we put up where we don’t have budtender like California, we have pharmacists and the pharmacists are gonna help educate you about your medicine. And if you really want to know what the strain is of this product that you buy, you have to talk to the gatekeeper, sorry, the pharmacist who has that information and you know, that’s how they provide their value add in the equation is by being some sort of Sherpa for, for the folks who, who have those kinds of questions. What they don’t tell you is that a lot of these pharmacists are just retail pharmacists who converted as soon as the medical market opened. And they don’t necessarily know anything beyond the script that they’re given by the employer in terms of what to say, you know, do you want sativa or Indica, that kind of thing? So, the strain names being different obviously leads to a lot of confusion. You need a rosetta stone of sorts just to be able to determine. Well, what are the actual genetics of this product? What am I, what am I about to consume here? And after sales on the adult use side were flat for a while, there’s a lobbying group comprised of those four MSOs that I mentioned earlier and they decided, well, we are going to just revert to using, the real stray names on the adult-use side. And of course, they had a carve-out in the, the law RERECA or whatever it’s called the, the, the lengthy acronym for the law that legalized adult-use cannabis in Connecticut. There’s a carve-out in there that allows them to do that. So now adult use can use the actual strain names. But any product that is exclusively medical still has to use the fake ones. So the patients are carrying that burden of still needing the rosetta stone. Another thing, another aspect of the market that changed. When you think of edibles in Connecticut, historically, it has been baked goods. You know, it has not been candy or gummy-type edibles. And because, well, we got to keep the kids safe, we got to keep the little children safe. And while I am 100% on board with that and I, I don’t want to see, you know, bootleg products being sold in gas stations and stuff that my kids can buy. I think again, this was more about placating the prohibitionist elements. So adult use comes around and suddenly gummies are ok. Gummies are fine. And they’re only allowed, you know, they’re allowed on the less strictly regulated side of the market that being recreational. And I asked the question, I said, well, can you point to the research, can you point to the peer reviewed clinical studies? Can you show me the calculus that was utilized to come to this conclusion? And of course, the answer is no, the answer is, you know, it’s a way for us to make more money. And that was also the case with some of the extraction methods for the concentrates for the longest time, it was basically CO2, there was no butane extraction going on in the state of Connecticut because some kids in Watertown blew themselves up, you know, with a, with a homemade Butane foil…
Ed Keating
Watertown, Colorado. There were a lot of places where that happened because I know when we were building out the database, one of our clients was in the insurance business and he said what we’d really like you to find out if you can when you call up the, the manufacturers is, what kind of manufacturing process do they use? Because they wanted to know if somebody was using a volatile compound, I’m like, ok, something that could explode. So, so, but I’m sure the Watertown issue sort of brought it to the forefront of Connecticut. But that’s definitely been an issue in a lot of places as to, you know, what’s clean and what’s not, I guess.
Lou Rinaldi
Absolutely.
Ed Keating
What leaves residue.
Lou Rinaldi
Yeah. And, that’s quite ironic given some of the other parameters of the market that I think we’re going to be getting into. But in terms of adult use changes, you know, the changes that adult use brought to the state, that was another one of them suddenly BHO was allowed, BHO extracts are now available. But the biggest and the most impactful change to patients, and I say this referring to the patient population that still sources from regulated dispensaries, which has been nose-diving in recent years along with enrollment in the medical program. But for those patients who are still sourcing from the regulated dispensaries, product availability, and variety has become a serious, serious problem. Right around the time, shortly after the market launched a bunch of the local TV stations had interviews with patients who were saying I can’t find XY or Z that I used to use anymore to treat my epilepsy. I can’t find this tincture anymore. I can’t find this RSO. It’s no longer, no longer at my dispensary, or those products have been relocated and diverted to the adult-use market. Again, because we’ve only got four producers in the state and now you’ve gone from supplying anywhere between 45 and 50,000 individuals in the medical program to a state of, you know, 3 million+. You know, obviously, some subset of those is going to be interested in animals, but, but a significant increase in demand in theory anyway, so it’s been, it’s been impactful in a lot of negative ways. And I think the spin that you see from the regulator is always that, oh, there’s been no impact to the medical program. Now, patients can, can get five ounces a month instead of 2.5. But what good does that do to increase their allotment if the products that they’re looking to purchase are not available?
Ed Keating
You know, nothing, nothing burger. One thing I want to dig into, as we, you know, sort of focus on some of the next steps are, you know, you’ve outlined in, in your work, some of the biggest issues or things that you’d like to see changed about Connecticut’s program, like remediation when there’s product failure, regulatory capture media issues, supply chain oligopoly testing and even the lottery process, you know, given that we don’t have the rest of the afternoon to dig through all those. I’m curious, you know, as you look out, now, which one do you see as the most important for you, your efforts, and for patients really.
Lou Rinaldi
So there’s, I’ll try to do a, a brief flyover of each of those items that you touched on because I honestly think there a lot of them are equally important. One particular sea change in the Connecticut market is as of July 1st 2023 all adults in the state are legally allowed to grow cannabis at home, which is a major victory, a populist victory in my opinion and possibly the only real lever that folks can pull to, to have total control over the products or the the cannabis that they’re consuming. You mentioned remediation for folks that may not know remediation is a process to recover an unsaleable product or to preemptively treat it, so that it will pass lab testing the whole the whole premise of the the benefit of the regulated market is that the products are tested in a laboratory and therefore they’re safe. And that premise is essentially a lie because what remediation is, it takes many forms. There’s irradiation, X-rays, there’s ozone, hydrogen peroxide, all of these different substances and treatments. Originally, like I mentioned when I first became a patient, if a sample did not pass testing, they weren’t required to report it to the state. It just got sent back to the submitter and, and chalked up to research and development. And that was one of the facts that I learned during my call with the director of the lab that no longer exists was oh yeah, we just call that R&D, we send it back. We let them remediate and resubmit wash rinse and repeat until they get a passing grade. Now in food and beverage, like if I have spinach that failed a test, the FDA says I can’t go back and treat that and then turn it into a juice drink or something. I have to dispose of that. I legally am required to dispose of that. And while we’re on the FDA kick, when I go to the grocery store and I buy a gallon of milk, it says right on the label pasteurized. So they are disclosing that. No, this is not in fact, raw milk, this is a product that has undergone a heat treatment, you know, ostensibly for purposes of safety, consumer safety. So now after the regulatory changes of the 2022 legislative session, they have moved that sort of squishiness of the wash rinse repeat to the front end of the testing process. That is to say they now allow pre-emptive remediation prior to the initial sample submission to the laboratory. So you’re essentially, we’ve made it legal to completely game lab testing here if I have a batch and I’m about to take a sample and I have real doubts that it’s gonna pass once I get it to the lab, I can blast that thing with ozone, I can hit it with radiation, I can dunk it in the hydrogen peroxide and then I can submit it once I’m confident that it, it is far more likely to pass the testing. So, remediation is it, it, it is not unique to Connecticut. It started in Canada, I believe and it has since sort of permeated a lot of regulated markets down here. I’m not saying get rid of it altogether. All I’m advocating for is truth in advertising and accuracy in product labeling. Put a little nuclear symbol on the label or something to let me know, hey, this product has been treated with radiation whereas this other one has not. And then let me as a consumer, as a patient, make an educated and informed decision. So that’s the remediation side of it. The regulatory capture piece that is, is much more in terms of market structure and in terms of the way that there has been a systemic effort to exclude legacy growers and small craft producers from entering the market at all. There is market share protectionism for those four MSOs that has manifested in a number of ways and was supposed to be addressed through this concept of social equity, which ended up getting co-opted. It was supposed to be folks who are most, you know, adversely impacted by disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs are gonna get first crack at entering this industry and you know, standing up their operations, what that ended up being was a mechanism for the incumbent licensees to expand their existing outsized footprint in the state at a reduced cost, you know, essentially through tokenism. And you know that a lot of these arrangements, these equity joint ventures don’t necessarily guarantee that the social equity partner will maintain their majority ownership after a certain amount of time has passed. So it’s basically been a way for the incumbents to kind of grow their dominance in the market while putting a fresh code of identity politics on the front of it to make it look good in terms of optics for the state. So it’s, it’s unfortunate the way that a program with the best of intentions that I fully agreed with has, has functionally been co-opted to the point now where some of the folks who were given provisional social equity licenses for cultivation as an example are now, they’ve kind of had the rug yanked out from under them and it’s, well, you’re not gonna grow anymore. We have deemed you fit to sell the products of these four companies. So you can be a retailer of the existing supply chain, but you cannot enter that supply chain. And that’s not even considering the planning and zoning challenges around towns that have created moratoriums and zoning boards who have shown favorable treatment to former GOP state senators, for example, versus you know, the average individual, or the legacy grower. So I’d like to see more competition in the market. I advocate for more competition and more choice. I do feel that the hemp farmers that were already licensed by the state should have an opportunity to enter into the market as well to provide some diversity in the supply chain. Because the quality of the products I mentioned remediation, but the overall quality of a lot of these products compared to other neighboring markets is pretty bad. There’s the, I said before how a lot of patients are no longer sourcing from Connecticut-regulated dispensaries, many of them are going to Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and especially Maine where the product quality and the the value proposition, the price is so drastically improved over Connecticut where we typically see a 200 to 400% markup for identical products. So there’s some of that going on on the media side of things, most of the media, I call corporate media, who publish anything related to cannabis. It’s not actual journalism, it’s not investigative, it doesn’t have any sort of a skeptical bent whatsoever. It’s just parroting press releases and providing free marketing and advertising for an emerging industry. And to some extent I get it, you know, they need the advertising dollars, they have to kind of play the game. But it’s been, it’s been like pulling teeth to get some of these media entities to take a little bit more of a skeptical look at the industry here and to start really digging beneath the surface and not just taking everything they’re told at face value. And lottery process, you mentioned as well there, that’s been much criticized in terms of how licensing is done in Connecticut. There’s all this talk fearful, talk about market saturation, crashing the market, driving down prices and making it, you know, not worth getting into the industry at all. So the way that Connecticut decided to attack that problem was by having a lottery system and what they, one of the fatal flaws of that system, in my opinion, was allowing for a single applicant to submit as many entries as they could afford because of course, there’s a big fee all of which went into a slush fund, something like north of $53 million for one round of the lottery. The fees were collected by the state and some folks were able to submit more than 10% of the total number of applications received for a given category of a license…
Ed Keating
Yeah, I if I remember correctly because we looked at it and we chose not to include that data in our database. I think there were somewhere north of 30,000 applications across all categories that came in and you know, a lot of them, I, you know, I, I think in one case there was 880 came in from, from one group and that, that’s just one number that sticks out in my head. And, you know, obviously that’s a lot more chances than, you know, one person who’s just trying to, let’s say, get a store in their hometown.
Lou Rinaldi
That’s right. That’s right. And, and some of the ways that I mentioned the disproportionately impacted areas or dia those maps were updated after the initial round of licensing, after certain folks were granted their license, including the former commissioner of the regulator. And I mentioned former GOP state senators, you know, folks who I have a sneaking suspicion were not disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs. But you know, who am I to judge or speculate along those lines? So, the goalposts continue to get moved and there’s, there’s very clearly some impropriety that goes on with this lottery and licensing process. The second round of the lottery was supposed to have been completed last year. It still has not happened. And now the Connecticut Cannabis Chamber of Commerce put out a release within the last couple of weeks saying that the next round of the lottery is delayed indefinitely based in part on feedback received by the current licensees who are terrified of introducing more competition in the marketplace because they know they can’t compete on quality. So the way that they want to compete is by limiting choice, you have to put your money in one of these four buckets. So we got a 25% chance of getting your money. If we increase the competition, that chance goes way down.
Ed Keating
So it’ll be, it’ll be interesting. And I don’t think the state tracks this data, it’s more the surrounding states, you know, given what you said before about the price differential across state borders and we’re such a small state, you know how much cannabis purchasing is happening outside our borders. Because I know somebody who went to Maine and they were within the last week and they were just dumbfounded as to the difference compared to what they’d have to you know, pay to get the same amount here. So yeah, well, that, that’s interesting, measurable data going back to where we started the pod today in terms of, you know what information we get because I know, I think it was Illinois was one of the states that tracks out-of-state purchases. I imagine when the driver’s license gets swiped and they’re like, oh, you’re from Iowa or you’re from Indiana or someplace like that. I, I don’t know if that happens elsewhere, but that would be interesting data if it were, available. But one of the last questions I want to ask you is you’ve talked about a lot of challenges and, and things not being great with the system aside from, homegrown being approved. But when we last spoke, you also shared that there seemed to be some good movement toward a patient ombudsman. And I don’t know if you qualify that as a success story, but, you know, you really pushed for that and, you know, I, I think that’s something, you know, part of the story that, that, that should be told.
Lou Rinaldi
Yeah, thanks for bringing that up, Ed. That was an idea that I had going back almost to the beginning. You know, once I had that sort of epiphany that, hey, it’s not all peaches and cream here, The regulator is not ne cannot necessarily be trusted to act in the interest of patients. So how have we addressed those sorts of challenges historically in America, you know, through this government notion of checks and balances? So other, you know, I had heard whispers of this being pursued in other states and I thought, you know, this is an idea that could work in Connecticut is the creation of sort of an ombudsman, an arbiter who acts as kind of the liaison between the patient population and the legislators and the regulator and, you know, somewhat, but it can’t just be a go-between. It has to be someone deputized with a little bit of teeth. You know, there has to be some ability to affect positive change that does not rely solely on the regulator. So I came up with this idea, I fleshed it out over a couple of years. And then last year, I managed to get the attention of the State House majority leader Jason Rojas. And we had some conversations actually, right around this time last year, ahead of the legislative session, and just describe, you know, he had his senior Policy Council reach out to me and we talked about the parameters and what it would look like and what this person’s responsibilities would be. I added some extra parameters or suggestions like I feel like whoever ends up in this role should be completely and totally divested of any financial position in the cannabis industry for the duration of the role. I also don’t feel that it should be a political appointee of the governor based on that lack of trust and, you know, the way that things have played out up to this point, I thought there should be a transparent and open ethical hiring process. So it went through a couple of different drafts and then it eventually got rolled into an omnibus bill, House Bill 6699 that did get passed right near the end of the session this year. So it is now, you know, effectively written into law. Originally, it had a deadline of October 1st for this person for this role to be stood up and activated, and it was moved under the office of the Health Care Advocate, which is, you know, in a separate vertical from the regulator, so it does sort of lend itself more to the checks and balances motion. So the unfortunate thing is that the head of that office recently departed to become a federal immigration judge, and the acting head of the Office of the Health Care Advocate is now his senior counsel – who I have been in contact with and I have been talking with about the role as well as leader Rojas in terms of making sure that it doesn’t fall off the table. There have been other legislative achievements in recent years, particularly a hemp council or some sort of a focus group that was supposed to be convened that did pass into law and then just never happened. So I’m trying to make sure that the ombudsman does still go through. Apparently, there has to be a bureaucratic process involving other state agencies that are now in the loop. But you know, I’m trying to stay on top of it. I’m trying to make sure that it gets implemented in a way that is consistent with the original vision, which is someone who’s going to put the needs and the concerns of patients first, someone who is going to facilitate healthy feedback loops between the patient community, and the regulator, and the legislators, and the governor, to just make sure that nothing is getting lost in the signal and that the voice of patients is actually being heard because at the end of the day, the p the purchases that patients have made in the medical program have never been taxable. So they have never been a priority. And it’s time to change that, you know, patients are more than just their wallets. They’re people who, you know, just by virtue of the fact that they are, patients are suffering are going through some sort of hardship that they’re trying to use cannabis to treat. And it’s very, it’s, it’s difficult to watch time and time again as their concerns get ignored and passed over as mine were. So this is the ombudsman idea was sort of a way to operationalize what I’ve been doing as a volunteer so that I don’t have to necessarily do it as a volunteer anymore or even do it at all anymore. Because quite frankly, I’ve encountered so much resistance and, and blowback, and just outright hostility along the way, that it has had a measurably negative impact on my quality of life. And I don’t know how much to your point at the outset. I don’t know how much longer I’m, I’m ready or willing to, to do this kind of work. So hopefully the ombudsman gets implemented in the way of which it was conceived. And we have someone who’s going to be officially fighting for patients on a go-forward basis in the state of Connecticut. And that is, that is what I sincerely hope.
Ed Keating
Wow. Well, you know, I was gonna ask more questions, but that is such a powerful end to all the things that we talked about. I think you really nailed it and it sounds like it’s a terrific legacy to all the work that you’ve done, you know, with that sort of systems thinking you’re talking about before. Like, how do we operationalize this, have this done at a place where it can be, you know, managed at scale and not have Lou doing it morning, noon, and night while he, you know, has other jobs and duties and roles, et cetera. So Lou, I want to thank you for joining us today. It’s really been a robust conversation.
Lou Rinaldi
Ed, I really appreciate the opportunity to share some of these ideas and some of these thoughts. If folks would like to get in touch, you know, my contact info is, is right up there. You can get me on LinkedIn easily. I would welcome the chance to have any kind of conversation about how we can make some patient-positive changes in the state of Connecticut and Ed. Thank you again so much for the opportunity.
Ed Keating
Excellent. Thanks so much, Lou.
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- Source: https://www.cannabiz.media/blog/cannacurio-podcast-episode-58-with-lou-rinaldi
