Cannabis and hemp. For years those substances operated in the shadows, and today they are at the center of a growing multibillion-dollar industry. How do you know what’s in them, and if they do the things they are supposed to do? Richard Miles interviews Adam Christensen, CEO of Botanica Testing, a company that tests cannabidiol and hemp.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade and podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:31

Cannabis and hemp. For years, those substances operated in the shadows today. They're at the center of a rapidly growing multibillion-dollar industry. How do we know what's in them? And if they do the things they're claimed to do, I'm your host, Richard Miles. And today on Radio Cade, I have Adam Christensen, CEO of Botanica Testing a company that tests CBD and hemp. Welcome to Radio Cade, Adam.

Adam Christensen: 0:59

Thanks. I'm happy to be here.

Richard Miles: 1:01

Adam, I'd like to start with basic definitions and explanations of how things actually work. I don't want to assume that all of our listeners sort of know everything there is to know about CBD and hemp. So why don't we talk about what is the difference between cannabis and hemp? A lot of people think they know, but they don't. So they use it interchangeably for marijuana. Why don't you give us a little basic chemistry lesson and tell us what are the main differences?

Adam Christensen: 1:23

So when it comes to plants, we have these things called chemo types, which is basically what are the main compounds in our plants. And so you have plants like lavender oil or peppermint or Rosemary. And now there are about five different kinds of Rosemary plant variations out there that are commercially sold. When it comes to cannabis, there's about seven or eight different main chemo types that we're talking about. But one that most people know and is becoming very popular is the difference between hemp and marijuana. And so when we talk about chemo types or the main compound in these plants, we're talking about two different compounds. One would be THC, and the other would be CBD now for the plants that you would associate with college or your downtime, those would be the high THC varieties, which are psychoactive. And so that would be the association that you get with being high. Now, in most of these plants, they started off as an acid form. And when the heat or time are introduced, that's when they convert over and they lose the acid part of the compounds. And so they go from THCA to THC, which is why, when you are smoking marijuana, you need to light it. So you introduce heat and then you get the psychoactive effects. Now in the products that we test, we are testing the chemo type of CBD, which is a non-psychoactive compound, which has been found to be helpful with a variety of conditions, as well as symptoms. And so for CBD, when you introduce heat, it goes from CBDA to CBD. And so those are the products now that are becoming widely available on the market, simply because they don't have any psychoactive effects. And the levels of THC in them are negligible so that you could technically smoke hemp all day long and never feel the high effect .

Richard Miles: 3:17