Utah Synthetic: A Deep Dive with the Erin Brockovich of Cannabis, Part One

Christine Stenquist, the founder/president of Utah’s Together for Responsible Use and Cannabis Education (TRUCE), said on a recent call that she tells people she is the Erin Brockovich of cannabis. The claim was made a good half-hour into our call, plenty of time for me to learn that it was no exaggeration. Stenquist is the sort of cannabis activist every state needs, not only for her deep understanding of the issues and the state’s politics and culture, but because of her seemingly unshakeable determination to get the job done, and done right. As she proudly reminded me during our conversation, her tenacity is currently striking fear in the heart of her opponents.

Like most effective advocates, Stenquist’s motivation is composed of personal, political, and moral elements brought together at just the right time and in just the right amounts to create magic. She is a brain tumor surgery survivor who has engaged Utah politics for years on behalf of people in need of cannabis and has been brought to action because of a situation that, as will become obvious from this conversation, offends her sense of right and wrong. In this case it involves a Utah original sin, its flirtation with synthetic cannabinoids via the Prop 2 Medical Marijuana Initiative, which voters passed in 2018 but which the legislature then altered.  The result was a boon in synthetic cannabis and a disaster for Utah’s cannabis patients, according to Stenquist, who has returned to fight unregulated synthetic cannabis following a health break after several years of intense advocacy work.

This also is a story that is unfolding in real-time. Stenquist is in constant communication with contacts and “spies” she has cultivated over the years, and information flows like water. She received one piece of relevant information via text during our interview and mentioned it immediately on the record. Neither is there any indication the intensity of the synthetic debate will slacken in Utah as its January legislative session fast approaches, and questions remain whether Utah will address a situation that puts the health and safety of its citizens in potential jeopardy, or as Stenquist believes is likely, it will continue to adhere to the interests of industry players Stenquist claims are putting products on the market they know contain unacceptably high thresholds of degradant ingredients, thresholds they want to raise via a legislative process Stenquist says is long since corrupted.

The Making of a Cannabis Activist

“I had brain surgery back in 1996,” said Stenquist of the malady that would impact her life so profoundly. “I still have 60 percent of my tumor left. During the brain surgery, they hit a blood vessel and I hemorrhaged, had a stroke, and slipped into a coma. When I awoke they decided not to proceed taking out the rest of the tumor. It was benign but was so close to my brainstem that the doctor didn’t feel like it was worth risking my facial nerve because it would have caused paralysis on the left side. I came out of the coma, and I had a long intensive therapy. I spoke like a stroke victim. I slurred; I spoke in cursive.

“I was bedridden and housebound for 16 years,” she continued. “I’ve been on pharmaceutical drugs trying to deal with the pain and the complications associated with multiple diagnoses that came after that. About 11 years ago, I had to hit a pain wall, which was common. I was on a pain management program and on a small patch, but I was not getting any relief. I was losing weight. The conversation was, we can’t get this under control, and we might have to put a feeding tube so that we can get nutrition and fluids in you, and that scared me.”

Raised in Miami, she had moved to Utah by this time. “I moved out here when I was almost 20 and I have been here ever since,” she said. “I have extended-family on my mother’s side that lives here. My mother is LDS, a Marriott from the Marriott Hotels. We’re just the poor cousins from the other side of the tracks, or the Marriott. And so, when I got a divorce I moved to Utah, where they tend to favor their moms. That’s the biggest reason, plus I needed to get away from my immediate family, where there is a lot of substance use and abuse. I’m a little bit older than everybody else, and I had a different life trajectory. I’m the white sheep in a black sheep family.

“I was 24 when I was diagnosed,” she added. “I was working at a hospital and was going to go into nursing school that spring. It was November 21, 1996, when I had brain surgery.”

The prognosis was not that great, either. “It was very unnerving at 24 to be told to get my affairs in order. I had a 50 percent chance of living. I had to figure out who was going to raise my babies; I had two small kids, five and three. So, it was very challenging to say the least, and the 16 years after were very challenging. I did get remarried eventually, and the struggles of having a couple more children really taxed my body, and it was just perpetuated by being down so long, and not being able to manage my health on a consistent basis.

The hard thing for me is I look normal,” she added. “Unless I’m in a full-blown migraine and my face is drooping, to the onlooker, I don’t look like somebody that has a disability. It’s one of those invisible disability situations, so people always treated me as a drug seeker. When you’re dealing with nerve damage, chronic pain, leftover brain tumor stuff, people didn’t know how to treat me, and so I was always mistreated. That’s a big reason why I stayed with one doctor, and I didn’t doctor shop and I signed my pain agreements for so long, because the abuse that you get from the medical community for being a chronic pain patient is so intense.

“That was a big reason why I wanted to come off of the pharmaceuticals entirely, and cannabis provided that journey for me,” she continued. “But using cannabis, buying it the first time, that was a nightmare. The whole experience purchasing cannabis on the black market was the biggest reason why I created my nonprofit, why I pushed for policy in my state, and why I continue to do it 10 years later. I truly believe that the next step in patient advocacy is standards. We have to get to a point where patients feel comfortable purchasing these products and can look at Certificates of Analysis (COAs) and chromatograms and understand that these are quality products.

“That’s the problem I’m running into right now,” she concluded. “We’ve got industry in our state, but these players aren’t chemists; they’re just individuals who are taking their shot at the green rush. They got awarded licenses because they greased the hands of some politicians or lobbyists to do that job for them. So, we have some unskilled individuals in our state who are producing products that have these synthetics in them, and I’m particularly concerned right now about these deltas from hemp analogues or poorly processed flower. We’re not sure why these aggregates are showing up; we just know that they’re here and the quantity is rising, not lowering, which means that they have not figured out what they’re doing, and now they’re just trying to change the law to accommodate that practice.”

What is a Synthetic Cannabinoid?

Is there a set definition of what synthetic cannabis means or is a part of the problem that the definition varies? “There is,” said Stenquist, “but it’s a twofold answer. The federal government has a definition. If you go back to the Farm Bill, the federal government had to make a clarifying statement in which they defined what synthetic is. Our state, though, is notorious for playing with nomenclature. They love to go in and redefine things to fit their needs. So, you will hear things like semi-synthetic. Well, what is that? It’s either synthetic or it’s not.

“If you do anything to chemically change the natural state of something, it becomes synthetic,” answered Stenquist. “You’re changing nature; you’re altering it, so that defines it as synthetic. With delta-8, with the THC analogues that come from hemp, those are all synthetics. If human beings did not interrupt any of that process, those things would not exist, so they do not naturally occur at those levels, and that’s the point. Nature has created this plant with minor cannabinoids; they’re at that level for a reason. For human beings to then go in and manipulate that using acids and unsavory practices, and define that as if it’s a natural thing because those traits and elements were in there, that’s splitting hairs a bit, you know what I mean?

“It gets very convoluted,” she added, “and my point on all of this – and this is how I try to simplify it to legislators and to fellow advocates – is that we have a synthetic process for single molecules; it’s called the FDA. If you feel like delta-8, delta-10, delta-6, any of these nonsense synnabinoids that have been created in the lab are worthy of study, that’s what the FDA is there for. That’s where the experiment needs to happen, and not in the patient population. That’s my concern.”

Is what is happening in Utah similar to what is happening in Texas, which is experiencing an explosion of unlicensed delta-8 products?  “We’re kind of mixing two different problems,” said Stenquist. “We have a delta-8 situation. Delta-8 is the analog that comes from hemp THC. In my opinion, those analogs need to have standardization in place, and they have no business in any current medical program because they have not been proven to be efficacious. They do not have standards, and when I say standards, I mean what are the adjutants that you’re using to create these products. Those need to have standard levels. We have that in the regular THC programs because we’ve had medical cannabis in those standards for about 26 years now.

“But this hemp analog situation is new,” she added. “It needs standards, and it needs a little more vetting than what has happened. It turned into this boom overnight because there was a massive supply of hemp biomass sitting around because everybody and their dog thought they were going to make millions being CBD dealers. So that’s one issue. The second issue we’re having in Utah is with the extraction process that’s going on with delta-6a10a, and I don’t see any other states having this problem. Our state is claiming it’s because we’ve strengthened up our testing, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s because of our laws. We must identify things that hit a certain peak, and it’s forced my hand to go and find out what they’re doing

“That’s the thing I’m calling out,” she emphasized. “There are practices going on in our state that haven’t been standardized, and I really put the blame on the federal government. Their inaction for so many years has created a lot of problems in our country. We need to validate this faith in this industry and provide banking and protection so we can do the rescheduling or descheduling so that the studies can actually happen. There’s a whole domino effect that needs to take place, but we need somebody in the White House and in our Congress to actually move forward on it. But like I see in my state, I know what happens in DC. Lobbyists are there to prevent certain things. I have a lobbyist here whose employer has the largest supply of tainted products, who was actively on the Hill continuing to push for ten percent of unknown cannabinoids degradation to be allowed because they haven’t proven that they’re not safe. That’s the logic these industries are running with. They want to do human experiments on the patient population because they haven’t had anything that proves that they’re not safe. But these are newly created things that are happening because of an extraction process, so there’s a lot of work that still needs to happen in the cannabis space.”

Out of Patients and Patience

“As a brain tumor patient – and most of my patient population has left pharmaceutical industry behind; they have left Western medicine behind – delta-8 is not what they are looking for. They are not actively searching synthetics; they’re looking towards plant medicine, clean products, and states that have viable medical programs or adult use programs. This delta-8 garbage and all this fancy stuff is not what people go for. Listen to some of these patients and the hives they get from these products. Nobody said, ‘We want synthetic weed.’ This is a situation of the tail wagging the dog. The hemp industry created the demand.

“And so, I’m here to say, let’s get back to plant medicine, let’s get standards set in place,” she continued. “I’m not going to stop the hemp company from doing what they want to do, but I am going to stop them from harming the patient population. That’s my concern. If there are people out there that want to put these degradants and these types of trashy things in their bodies to get high. as a libertarian, that’s fine. We have smoking, that’s still legal, and everybody knows what smoking can do to us. I just don’t want them in the patient population in our supply chain. There needs to be a standard of excellence that is expected when we talk about medical cannabis. The frustrating thing to me is it’s our pharmacist, the senator, who allowed this to happen even after my warning and caution that this was a dangerous route to go. I brought Dr. Russo to the table. He’s spoken to my health department and cautioned them that delta-8 indices should not be in the medical program. The fact that my state is still entertaining its use is very worrisome.”

The 10-Percent Kill Switch

As Stenquist explained it, the current fire that burns in her was lit earlier this year when a threshold she insisted upon forced her hand. “True North is the player that came to me earlier this year and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got these unknown cannabinoids that keep spiking, and we can’t figure out what’s going on. Just wanted to give you a heads up. We’re trying to work with the state to figure it out.’ That was cool, and I was like, ‘Thanks for giving me the heads up.’

“Then I get a phone call the first week in September from the director of the Ag department, the cannabis stuff, Dr. Brandon Forsyth, who says to me, ‘We have got some quality product concerns that are coming up and I wanted to chat with you about it. We’re going to be seeing some new labels on synthetics.’ As soon as he said that I knew our kill switch was now activated during the session this year.”

She explained, “Back in February, I had gotten Ethan [Russo] to push the health department to come out against delta-8 being in the program. We showed there’s no studies. Ethan gave a great presentation; the doctors were all on board. February of 2022, the health department puts out a statement, there are not enough studies on delta-8, we don’t approve of this. So that triggered the state to try to clean up some of that mess during that whole kerfuffle during the session, and it’s a madhouse. During the session, the lobbyists for True North applied pressure to expand the limit. In our law, we had a 5 percent limit on unknown cannabinoids that were allowed in the product. That’s still kind of dirty in my opinion, but that’s what was allowable. We were hoping to push that down further to like 2 percent or 3 percent, even though we want zero percent synthetics or degradants in the program.

“Anyway,” she continued, “they pushed and pushed and pushed, so I went to the senator. I sent one of our doctors who sits on our board to explain to the pharmacist why this practice was not good and what harm the industry could potentially do. He ignored us. I don’t think he understood what we were saying to be very honest, and I said, ‘Well, if you are going to insist on synthetics, we demand labeling. Patients have a right to know if it’s whole-plant or if it’s synthesized.’ They agreed, so the kill switch for us was if this exceeds 10 percent, that labeling goes into effect. So, the fact that the Ag department was calling me in September – six, seven months later – telling me new labeling is coming out, it’s going to say synthesized and these are the new cannabinoids that we found.

“I was like, please send me information on your new cannabinoids;” she continued. “I would like to have my subject-matter experts examine what it is you guys are doing. I sent that information to Ethan Russo, and Dr. Chris Hudalla, who is with ProVerde Labs, and then Ethan sent it to Muhammad at Mississippi to look at the chromatograms, and they said, ‘Without a doubt the synthetic is in there.’ So, I went back to the state and said, these are degradants, these are synthetic due to poorly processed flower. This is what my subject-matter experts are saying. The state dismissed me. ‘No, we’re moving forward on this.’ I said, ‘Have you put out a bulletin to alert all the patients that this is about to happen?’”

What did she want the state to do? “Not allow these products,” she exclaimed. “And this is the thing. They’ve been telling me this stuff was in the products the entire time. Demanding the labeling was my only move to activate this moment, this exact moment, to alert the patient population as to what was going on. In the middle of the session, it’s really hard to move media to cover something that’s concerning, and I didn’t know if it was a concern until it hit this 10 percent level. That’s a lot. I hate to be so graphic, but would you want 10 percent fecal matter in any of your food?”

What about traditional small farms? Is she opposed to them? “I still use the traditional market,” she assured me. “I still have my medical cannabis card.  I rarely buy anything from our legal market, and the reason is because I don’t trust it. I have gotten flower that is so dry it turns to dust, and that is a common complaints in the state. I have seen moldy gummies with repeated complaints about a particular brand, and the state will not remove or revoke their license. It’s just one problem after another. Bad lab testing. I called that out when a local lab here and a brand were advertising that they had flower at 45 percent THC.”

Did she see these issues as a national problem? “It is, and that’s frustrating and part of why Lezli Engelking (CEO of FOCUS) and I are sort of teaming up,” said Stenquist. “I haven’t seen any patient advocacy groups talk about this. I’m affiliated loosely with Americans for Safe Access and reached out to them to ask them if they were doing anything on this synthetics and the whole delta thing. They don’t want to upset the industry because they rely so heavily on their donations to support their advocacy.

“I reached out to NORML, and they are definitely not friendly on this whole synthetic thing,” she added. “I’ve worked to help where I can. I sat on a panel about Texas, which has a problem with delta-8, but when people are desperate, they’ll take anything. I say that because before I found cannabis, I was entertaining the thought of using Spice, so I understand the desperation when people use delta-8. They can just get it at the gas station, they’re going to get relief quickly, and people are always looking for that.”

Just to be perfectly clear, I asked Stenquist if she would oppose delta-8 if standards were imposed. “I am not against delta-8-derived products if there are standards in place, as long as they’re not in the medical program,” she clarified. “They have not been proven to be efficacious, but people are just wanting to get delta-8 high. That’s adult-use to me. If that’s the high you want, by all means. I’m also supportive of safe injection sites. I’m fine with people wanting to do the adult thing, but let’s just clean it up.

“The whole point in having legal things is that we have clean products even behind safe injection sites and needle exchanges,” she added. “That’s about quality of products so that we don’t have death and harm. It’s a harm reduction thing, and as a harm reductionist, I want us to reduce harm. That’s why I support medical cannabis dispensaries because they’re supposed to test, they’re supposed to have labeling, they’re supposed to be providing quality reassurance to the patient consumer. Drugstore-quality type of stuff is what we want. We don’t want gas station-quality stuff out in the community, so it would be nice if we’ve set standards. I hate government regulation, but there are times and places where it makes sense, and if you’re doing human consumption of anything, we should have some quality assurance.”

Odd Duck Utah

The Utah story is particularly discouraging because the program is run by medical professionals, so it’s unsettling that a regime would be proactively put into place that could very well be unsafe.

“Yes, and I’ve called it out,” said Stenquist. “I didn’t just do it in a meeting and was quiet about it. I have brought patients to these meetings for the past 20 months. I’ve been battling their synthetic nonsense for 20 months, and this is finally the moment that I’ve been waiting for, for the story to get outside of the mountain range. My local press was terrified to touch this. They’re not cannabis people, and it’s complicated. I keep one journalist up to date because it’s so convoluted and there’s so much deceit that’s going on. Look, I had to turn the state in to have an audit done of the Ag department because of their corruption. They found the corruption, but they didn’t do a damn thing about it. I’m about to have another request for a state audit of the medical cannabis program, chip to tail. That’s why I’m involved with Lezli. I know that her company can help us.

I noted recent news reports hinting that the state is seriously reconsidering its prior position. Did she agree? “Well, this is the thing,” said Stenquist. “I’ve got spies everywhere – you have to in advocacy work – and I had a contact call me last night and tell me that the lobbyist for that company is actively on the hill lobbying legislators the past two weeks. The session starts in January, so they’re scrambling to get language dry on those bills so that they feel reassured. He’s pushing to keep the 10 percent unknown threshold, pushing to keep these degradants in the bill, claiming I’m making up a bunch of nonsense, that this is all a red herring, and I’m making people freak-out over nothing.

“But these are not qualified individuals,” she insisted. “They are just lobbyists. Even the industry players do not have analytical chemists working for them. There’s only a couple of companies here in Utah that are producing clean products with zero synthetics in their products. This is the problem. 84 percent of companies here have this issue, but the state isn’t being honest about that fact.”

84 percent have a problem with contaminants? “Correct,” she said, “and they won’t do anything about it because it’s a big chunk of the supply chain, and they’re freaking out. That’s what people were telling me: ‘Christine, these things have been in the product the entire time.’ Why have they been in the product the entire time? Because Utah was the only state that allowed hot hemp and delta-8 and those analogs into the program. I have pictures and proof of that, and I have patient complaints.

“The state is notorious for lying about taking care of things during the session and then not doing it,” Stenquist continued. “I’ve had the Lucy and Charlie Brown ball pulled out from underneath me so many times with the legislative body. I do not trust them and no one in their right mind in this state trusts them. So, for that headline to say the state is thinking about doing something, don’t bet on it!”

The Seventh Circle of Hell

I asked Stenquist if she would you know which products to pull off the shelves in a medical dispensary in Utah today. “Not entirely,” she said. “The state won’t provide me a list. I know some. This is the fight. There are companies that are clean that don’t have shelf space in some of these dispensaries. Not all the companies are vertically integrated, so they have to bargain with their competitors to have shelf space in the limited dispensaries in the state. So, the dirty players, the ones the state chose to have the licenses, are occupying a fair portion of the supply. “

And unwitting patients are walking in? “Yes,” she answered. “We ask for COAs. They don’t give us COAs. Sometimes they give us COAs, and some things are labeled; some things aren’t. The biggest distributor in our state has a delivery service. That’s why they’re able to get their products all over the state, but they have tainted products of their own, and they also carry everybody else who has tainted products. I’ve asked them to shut their operation down and they said, ‘We just can’t, Christine. It will bankrupt us.’ This goes back to the state. This is the state’s problem. They should have shut this down when they first started.”

Is there any middle-ground way forward here? “They need to agree to be audited,” she said. “Do an audit with a company like Lezli’s and go through the process to figure out what it is you’re doing wrong so we can clean you up. I want a situation of rising tide lifts all boats. Me calling out these practices is not a desire to shut down industry. It’s to demand that they be ethical ambassadors. They are expected to be the ambassador between me and this plant, and if they are not being ethical, they’re not doing their job. That’s the agreement that the patients in the state have arranged, that these individuals are going to grow your medicine, they’re going to test it and they’re going to package it for you.

“They won’t allow me to grow it,” she added. “They won’t allow me to do any of that with the plant, so I demand that the ambassadors they are allowing to do it perform ethically for patients and for public safety. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I expect the regulators to be proficient and to know better and if you don’t have the qualifications, by God, you better step down. I’m tired of little egos in politics. What’s going on now? Dr. Brandon Forsyth is a chemist. He doesn’t care about cannabis. He’s not a cannabis person. He wants to test hay. He’s in agriculture. Give him soybeans, he’ll be happy all day long. The cannabis issue is a nightmare for him because he doesn’t understand it.

“I’ve been in this space for 10 years,” continued Stenquist, her ire up. “I know amazing doctors in the space, just numbers of people across the board, and I’m still learning new stuff all the time. I can understand and appreciate being intimidated taking on a new agricultural product, but we need people who can understand this. Over at the Health Department, I‘ve got this Napoleon-type who is just some lackey from the Huntsman campaign that got appointed here as a favor. He doesn’t know anything about cannabis. He walks around just flexing authority, applying pressure to industry, putting fines on them that don’t need to be there, and then is abusive towards patients when we bring quality product concerns. It is a very abusive situation that needs to be exposed.”

I asked if the church is a part of this story. “Oh, honey,” said Stenquist. “Just Google my name for the backstory, not only because I had to sue the state because of the church’s involvement. Their involvement meddling in Prop 2 is legendary. In fact, I was the one that exposed their meddling. I went in to have a negotiation with the church in June 2018. We had just qualified for the ballot. I had postponed our meetings so that we could get past the 30-day mark. The church wanted to stop the ballot initiative entirely, and we had brought several Mormon advocates in to bear their testimony to the church about cannabis. I have an ally and advocate who’s in Australia. She’s the me of Australia. She has a son who has a brain tumor. We had her flown in because she’s an LDS member as well and she begged the church to understand that this is something we need to do. Now, the church wasn’t involved with any other state’s medical-access program, not one of them. They have meddled in Arizona recreational, and they meddled in Nevada’s recreational, but they never said a peep in any of the states that fought for medical except Utah.”

Does that mean Utah will only ever be medical? “That’s what they claim,” said Stenquist. “But let me catch you up to speed on a conversation I heard about, and this is politics, things are fluid, so it can change on a dime. But the current conversation from one of our legislators that I know is talking about creating a program for these synthetics, for all these THC analogs, because the Ag department broke the state’s own law against the ban of these analogs, they allowed them, and now the state is stuck trying to figure out to regulate it. I don’t know if you caught that, but the Ag department broke the state’s own ban on these analogs and allowed it through rulemaking, opening the floodgates. Now the state’s trying to figure out how to fix it.”

Could the state sue its own Ag department to get the heat off itself? “I’ve gone to the Attorney General through the quiet route, but they will destroy me,” said Stenquist. “They are going to protect themselves. To that end. I’ve even gone to the governor’s office, and they keep dismissing me and referring me back to the department. I told them, ‘Look, I’m trying to stop the governor from being embarrassed. I’m trying to go to you because your state agency is misbehaving. They don’t want to hear it. The last resort is the injunction. I’ve got a doctor, I’ve got patients, I’ve got an industry player who’s willing to put funds up to help pay for the attorney. If I had money, I would be filing a RICO lawsuit against the state. I absolutely would, because it’s been shady from the start, and you know what, not one person in this state would be surprised. They would be cheering me on.

“Let me tell you, it’s tiring to be this longtime advocate that just has this institutional knowledge that nobody else has because they haven’t been around,” she added. “They don’t know all the stories, all the players, and all the backroom deals. But because I won the favor of a senator early on, I was able to know what I know now. I know there’s corruption in every state, I know there is with these programs, and it’s because we have a lack of real oversight. We don’t have real acknowledgement that we exist as an industry, we’re in this limbo state where you can have a dispensary but they’re not going to give you any banking protection, so you’re going to have to do shady stuff. I feel like the industry is forced to be abused by regulators and legislators and patients are forced to deal with the abuse of shady industry practices and ignorant legislators and regulators. And that’s why people like me and Lezli are explaining this to the public, or they’re never going to understand what’s really going on.”

It sounds like these issues could definitely replicate elsewhere. “That’s what the state is saying,” said Stenquist. “‘Christine, this is happening everywhere, stop talking about it.’ They want me to stop talking about it because everybody’s doing it. I’m like, ‘Look, you are abusers and you’re going to stop this. And if it is happening in other places, we will expose it, and we will get better. We’re not allowing shady practices to continue. I am a whistleblower. I am. I always tell people, ‘I am the Erin Brockovich of cannabis. If you’re doing some shady in Utah, I will find out.’”

Bareknuckle Politics

In the end, these issues are usually resolved for better or worse in the political arena. I asked Stenquist how many bills they are expecting in the upcoming session. “It can change,” she said. “The moment you print it, they can be like, ‘Oh, she said five bills, so we’re going to make sure there’s only three. But, talking to other lobbyists and knowing what we know, we’re looking at potentially five bills. They can merge a couple, or it could grow depending on how much pressure I’m applying, and I’m applying a lot. I am applying pressure from every walk I can muster right now and more to come. There’s probably going to be four bills. There are two senators and two representatives that generally run bills, and we’ll see where those go.

“One bill is supposed to be this whole 10 analog,” she added. “What the lobbyist shared with me was that they’re looking at putting all those analogs into a program that people can access only through medical dispensaries. Well, then you’re talking about a recreational hemp program in the guise of a medical synthetic hemp program, which is not a thing. I told the lobbyist, that’s not a real thing, so don’t let them spin it like that when you’re in these closed rooms. Just give them forewarning that I will come for their heads. It’s true. At this point, people are now scared. They realize that I’m back.

“I was very quiet,” she explained. “My health had failed me towards the end of that campaign with the ballot initiative. It was a six-year dead run that I was doing raising awareness and doing policy work on the hill for four years and then doing a ballot initiative for nearly two. I was exhausted, down to 115 pounds wet out of the shower, and I’m five-eight, so I had to take a break. I had to give myself healing time. Since I’ve been back, though, I’ve put the state and everybody on blast. I was in a dispensary yesterday, and a patient recognized me and asked if I was Christine. I said, Yeah, I’m the OSHA of cannabis. The patients appreciate what I’m doing because the whole thing is scary to them. But just talking to me and writing me terrifies most patients. They are worried that work is going to trace that email or that someone will find out.”

How many patients are there in the state? “There are 58,000 registered patients and that grows but our retention rate is a different number. We’re looking at about 30,000. Patients are so upset we have a Q and P program, which stands for qualified medical provider. Our state didn’t want us to have pot doctors, they hated the California model of you walk in, and 20 bucks later you have a card. So, they created a cap and make doctors cap out; you can only recommend like 250 patients for cannabis, and we had to go to the state and ask for permission to recommend more.

What about the number of doctors willing to do this? “They take a four-hour training course which basically gives them a brief overview of cannabis and then an hour on the law, and then they’re told that they have to write a prescription, and they have to write dosing parameters for their patients,” she said. “If they refuse to, the pharmacist at the dispensary has to write dosing parameters for patients. This is where I’m coming in, exposing that most of these doctors know nothing about cannabis. They barely understand CBD and THC, let alone decadents or analogs of hemp and delta-8, delta-9 from hemp and how is that different from delta-9 from marijuana. There is so much nuance to this industry that the average MD is not keeping up, but they’re still expected to write a prescription for these patients, and have it filled at the pharmacy – that’s what they call dispensaries here, and the dosing is for state-approved degradants by companies that are not meeting criteria that should be met in my opinion.

Is there any way to quantify the actual harm from these degradants? “I don’t know,” replied Stenquist. “Here’s the thing. We’ve had patients leave the program and message me saying cannabis just didn’t work for them, which was outrageous, because I had such a success rate with people, To hear that it’s not working, and we’re having this loss of patient retention, that’s what got me concerned about quality. A doctor called me last night that I am acquainted with in the space, and he said, ‘You started educating me on the degradation and out-of-the blue I had a patient show up last week who was complaining about this cart he got, and these really bad side-effects he’s having.’ Another MS patient came across a Forbes article I did a couple of months back, and she reached out to us because she was having all kinds of weird problems, and thought she was having a psychological break. She’s now attributing it to a synthetic that was a trashy high and caused a lot of rapid heart rate and anxiety.

“But we don’t know what’s happening to these patients, and that’s the problem,” she added. “Most people will carry on, and some have gone to the emergency room, where they’re being misdiagnosed with CHS (cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome). Why? Because we automatically assume CHS, and you better stop using cannabis. But then these same patients come back online and say, ‘I went back to my dealer and I’m fine.’

“So, can I be definitive,” Stenquist asked rhetorically. “No, and I think it would be irresponsible for me to act that way, that I know definitely what’s causing X, Y, and Z. But that’s the whole point; these are new things emerging based on processes done by inexperienced individuals who are not set to a standard. That’s why Lezli’s organization, FOCUS, is important because they see and understand the importance. We need to work with people who understand regulation and having a company like FOCUS come into my state and do an audit of the cannabis program tip-to-tail, and help each company understand their processes and learn something from experienced individuals. It will only help the company improve their quality of products and their business overall.

“As that improvement trickles down to the patient,” she added, “that improvement will also trickle-up, because then the legislators are not coming back every year putting band aids on a hemorrhage. They’re literally walking into this session thinking in all their infinite wisdom and experience of cannabis policy the past three, four years, that they’re going to figure out how to handle this. They’re not! They keep making it worse, year by year, and the kill switch for the patients, and for me, was demanding that label, just so that I can have these conversations with the press, just so I can spell it out clearly.

“They are acting intentionally,” stressed Stenquist. “We made such a big deal that we forced special meetings. At the last health department meeting, we brought this issue to the front. I sent all the board members webinars, white papers, studies on the deltas and the concerns that have been popping up the past two years. I wasn’t allowed to give any kind of presentation or bring any subject-matter experts, but the Ag department was going to be presenting on this and I didn’t want him spinning his nonsense again. So, I educated the doctors over a four-day weekend so that when they went in and they heard his presentation, they could actually ask questions that was going to hold all of them to the line, and they did. The doctors performed beautifully. They said things like, ‘This is not how we practice medicine. Who would allow this? How can you allow this? What is going on?’”

It was all for naught, added Stenquist. “Unfortunately, what they said to me was, ‘Christine, you know politics; nobody’s listening to us. We offer suggestions but nobody pays attention.”

For a true activist, these are the motivating challenges, the closed minds that refuse to open, the corrupt official who refuses to go. “In moments like this, when we’re talking about adding synthetics, this is absolutely the time that we need our doctors to be asking those questions,” said Stenquist. “That’s why we rely on their degrees. That’s why they’re sitting on the board. That’s why we have a pharmacist on the board. We have all these illusions of safety. I told the legislator, ‘This program is as fake as Disney’s Main Street. It is nothing but drywall and paint. There’s no substance here. You want the illusion of us treating it like medicine without adequately giving it the validity of medicine. Give us quality! Give us quality!!”

As we were talking, and shortly before we had to end the call, Christine got a text. “I just got a message. It told me that one of the senators I was just referring to, a Democratic senator, is saying go through with the injunction and get these bastards. She’s seeing the corruption. She’s hearing the conversations that they’re having. They’re trying to save their assess and continuing to prop up shady dealers. They want the money.”

Utah does not have an official tax on cannabis, explained Stenquist, but it does have a fee of $3 for every purchase a patient makes, plus the “outrageously high” fees they put on the industry players to keep their licenses every year.

“So, the legislator wants us to move forward on pushing back on some of these bad practices,” said Stenquist, “because it really is a matter of who is making the money, who is getting the most benefit out of it. I don’t understand why the state is allowing this. I think what happened was a decision was made so far back at the beginning that they continued to build on that house of cards. And honestly, this is the shit-storm that’s required to blow it all down.”

In Part Two of Utah Synthetic, we will pick up the story with Lezli Engelking of FOCUS.