North Coast cannabis marketplace sees surge among health and wellness users

The legalization of cannabis for recreational use this year has brought new consumers into the fold of the multibillion-dollar retail marketplace in California — but not all are looking to get high.

In fact, the easing of the stigma over cannabis has caused a surge this year of people using the plant for health and wellness reasons, even though medical marijuana has been legal in the Golden State for more than 20 years, industry officials said.

The newer users range from women looking to ease the nausea from chemotherapy and treatments for breast cancer — a disease which cannabis advocates say the plant appears to be uniquely suited for — to lawyers looking to reduce stress after a difficult workweek.

To accommodate the heightened interest from women with breast cancer, Raea Campbell of Mendocino is working to grow sales of her line of cannabis-based oils designed for breast massage. Campbell developed the homemade product, Bosm Wellness, a few years ago as her mother, Linda, went through breast cancer and found that the extracts from the plant helped her get through the disease with limited side effects.

Campbell had a limited production run in 2017, which she said was encouraging.

“It was overwhelming … I couldn’t keep up with demand,” she said. “It was a small-scale thing. I didn’t have a lot of funding to scale up.”

She is now searching for a company that can make and distribute her line, given new regulations that went into effect this year, particularly establishing higher standards for quality control tests.

“It’s part of inspiring a healthy breast lifestyle,” Campbell said.

The North Coast stands at the center of such activity, in large part being in the heart of the Emerald Triangle counties of Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity that historically have been the most prized growing region for cannabis. That means the local region is teeming with growers, manufacturers, medical professionals and retailers who are catering to the demands of customers looking for additional relief that is not provided by traditional medical practitioners.

“The frequency of these patients for cancer has just blossomed in the recent years,” said Jeff Hergenrather, a Sebastopol doctor who has provided recommendations to patients for cannabis treatments for almost 20 years. About a third of his patients have cancer, including breast cancer patients.

When Hergenrather started providing recommendations, almost all of his patients were already cannabis users. Today, more than half of his clientele have not tried marijuana before they visit him.

“I am busy. It’s a new era,” he said.

The sector, however, is still limited by restrictions in federal law, where the possession of cannabis is illegal with the narrow exception of a few research settings. Marijuana remains listed as a so-called Schedule 1 drug — the most severe category — by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. There is “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse” with such drugs, according to the agency.

Yet the tide is turning for a plant the has been used for thousands of years to treat medical conditions. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana. Last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a report that surveyed research on the health effect of cannabis, including more than 10,000 scientific abstracts.

© 2018 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.). Visit The Press Democrat at www.pressdemocrat.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.