Psychedelic legalization is brewing across America. City after city is decriminalizing psilocybin, which is laying the foundation for a strong industry. As this occurs, substances like mushrooms will require regulation, otherwise, it will face the same issues as other agricultural industries. Mold, mildew, pesticides, and other contaminants are major risks, especially in unregulated markets. Confident Cannabis is looking to provide some insight along the way.
Confident Cannabis, a leading B2B cannabis testing software company, has Connect, a publicly available database of all the chemical analyses on cannabis done with their tools. This allows for consumers or participants in the industry to be aware of what is being sold and consumed.
On October 29th, 2019 I spoke with Brad Bogus, the VP of Growth at Confident Cannabis, about the developing psychedelics industry, and specifically the possibility of a similar database being launched for psilocybin mushrooms.
Who is Brad Bogus?
“Luckily having the motivation to get involved, and pairing that with people that I knew in my network that could help me get access to an opportunity. When people in the business world say it’s all about who you know it’s not just a flat platitude, there’s some meaning to that.”
“I worked for 11 years in the marketing and tech start-up world and just got done with it. I wanted to try something that meant something to me, that I was interested in, that can help the world. When I first started my journey into cannabis I found an opportunity at the Denver Post with the Cannabist.”
“It just so happened that one of the higher up was someone I had done some previous work with at the Austin American Statesmen, the newspaper of record in Austin, Texas. Knowing him got me access to the Cannabist, and then working at the Cannabist got me a prolific network of movers and shakers in the industry.”
“I ran the business side of the publication, I was the General Manager of the cannabis. Ricardo was the Editor in Chief. He was in charge of editorial, I was in charge of advertising, events, and marketing, the business of the publication, outside of the editorial.”
“When the Cannabist laid me off nine months later I was stuck relying on that hastily assembled network to try to find me another opportunity. But, just like the first one, I spent enough time talking to people I knew in the industry and knew what I was looking for specifically. One of them knew about an opportunity here at Confident Cannabis, and they put me in touch with the owners, and after a few months of interviews and working out the details, I got my job here.”
“I knew a lot of people who were willing to help me find an opportunity that fit what I was looking for. Being specific about what I wanted and what I was looking for helped. I did get more than just this opportunity thrown my way, I didn’t want any opportunity that came my way, I wanted the right opportunity.”
“I had the privilege to be able to do that luckily, but at the same time, Confident Cannabis was at the top of my list. This was the one I wanted the most. I would have probably been distracted by other offers if they had come faster, or if they had been from other companies I respected, but this one happened in the right timing that I could take it.”
Why Confident Cannabis?
“I got a chance to talk to the founders. What struck me initially was how smart their approach to the industry was. By smart, I don’t mean they had some sort of novel idea that no one else was smart enough to come up with, although I think honestly that might be the case. It was more because they inherently understood the problems in the industry because they had spent time talking to the people who work within the industry and asking them.”
“A lot of other companies I’ve seen in this space have said “you know what cannabis needs? It needs POS systems, it needs loyalty systems, it needs all these things that have been figured out in the regular world, and we’re just going to make the cannabis version of that.” I find that very disinteresting because it’s just a matter of time before those major players like Eventbrite, or whoever steps into the space, and then they’re going to rip out any cannabis-specific technology, unless that technology has gotten too strong of a foothold. I didn’t really see that being a strong prospect.”
“But with Confident Cannabis they had spent a lot of time talking to operators, asking them what their real inherent problems are, and trying to fix the problem, not treat the symptom.”
“What I mean by that is linking lab testing and making lab testing the most important entry point for products onto our wholesale software, we were able to overcome some major problems that cannabis operators had with buying from each other online. They wouldn’t do it for a whole slew of reasons, a lot of them that could not be fixed by basic technology.”
“Things like not trusting one operator or another, or not believing test results, when they’re being test results via email or text message. So, understanding that those are big obstacles for cannabis companies making online orders happen, and the thing that we were trying to sole were online orders, like wholesale, that stood out to me as a very sophisticated approach.”
“Also, leadership here were guys were kids that weren’t trying to live the rockstar start-up private-jet life. When I came to interview the office was pretty modest. There was no sign out front that was flashy. When you walked into the space there wasn’t some big fuck-off sitting area where everyone’s like “wow this company has money.” They weren’t just wasting money.”
“But what they made sure they didn’t skimp on was employee benefits and making sure that the employees could get healthy snacks whenever they wanted to in whatever volume they wanted to. Also good time off, and those types of policies. When I see companies spending their money on employees rather than really nice furniture and equipment, to me that communicates responsibility. It also creates less volatility for a start-up, and a group that really believes in what they’re doing. Those are the reasons that Confident Cannabis stood out to me.”
Where Do You Think This Slow Crawl Towards Psychedelic Legalization Will Lead?
“I actually think it’s not a slow crawl at all, comparatively. If you look at the decades-long battle of anti-prohibition in cannabis obviously psychedelics are going to stand on those shoulders. The conversation began on legalizing psychedelics a lot more recently than the one on cannabis.”
“Within the same tribes, of course, you’re going to find people who are going to say all drugs should be legal. We’ve been talking about this forever, but specifically, on applying psychedelics to law it’s relatively recent. But, its support has been built way faster because all of this previous work was done on the cannabis side.”
“We’ve learned and a lot of the same arguments apply. Cannabis is a psychedelic medicine in it of itself. It’s just a different type of psychedelic. Its application for treating PTSD shouldn’t be understated, and its ability and its ability to help you rewire the way that you think or encounter your inner demons shouldn’t be understated.”
“Cannabis doesn’t let you avoid stress, it probably makes you panic if you’re super stressed out and you smoke some, but it’ll make you deal with it.”
How Do You See The Market Developing For Psychedelic Mushrooms?
“I feel like the medical and recreational markets around psychedelics are going to be developed differently than it was around cannabis. I don’t think we’re going to go through the same process of medical market to rec market where the medical market is sort of a gray market, your hands are off, and there’s not really a regulatory body monitoring every single product being made or sold, and the switch to the rec market where now you can buy things everywhere and it just needs to go through this process and being taxed to death.”
“We might jump to rec like that, but I see this ending up more in a pharmaceutical world than it’s going to end up in a libertarian medical world.”
What About The Fact That You Can Grow Mushrooms?
“I’ll take back what I said earlier, that I think psychedelics will take a slightly more pharmaceutical route. When I say that I’m talking around things like MDMA and LSD. However, I think when you’re dealing with an actual substance that you can grow in the home, a cannabis plant, a mushroom, the path will probably be the same. I think there will be decriminalization to gray market sort of medical phase because of the sole fact that you can’t tell me I can’t grow a mushroom at home.”
What Do You Think About The Rise Of Psilocybin Considering Confident Cannabis’ Connect Platform? Is There The Same Necessity For Information As Cannabis?
“Do I see the connection here in terms of testing and information? 1000%. A number of studies are going to come out like the MDMA study, they’re going to conclusively state that this is definitely suggested for integrative therapy use, and then a whole bunch of people whom have absolutely no idea how to deal with their shit are going to come out of the woodwork and say “wait you mean there’s actually a healthy option for me? Because I’ve tried every pharmaceutical on the planet and I feel numb and I feel terrible, and I hate myself still, but holy shit now I can try something that has hope.”
“That hope is what brought so many people to the table for cannabis and it’s going to bring so many people to the table for psychedelics. But, because that’s going to occur there’s also going to be a profit motive in the supplying of those things. So some people will grow extremely clean good quality mushrooms as they did cannabis, and some people will not.”
“They’ll use all sorts of toxic chemicals, or they’re going to allow mold to grow and not know how to remediate it and won’t care because obviously it’s the prohibition market, we’ll just sell it. People will take them and won’t know any better.”
“We need to have verified tested information to know our products are safe and clean and they have what they say they’re going to have in them. We need to know that somebody isn’t just going to sell someone who doesn’t know better white cap mushrooms so they instead give them actual psilocybin or any of the many other kinds of mushrooms that are out there. The amount of research that needs to be done for the public to become a little more educated on this is vast, but to be perfectly honest there’s more research done on psychedelics clinically than has ever been done on cannabis up to this point.”
“I think pairing lab testing which tells you your product is clean with the already existing volume of research that was done post MKULTRA, during MKULTRA, pre MKULTRA on LSD, and to a smaller extent psilocybin mushrooms, is how you get integrative medicine accepted for psychedelics. It’s going to be a crucial step, just as much as testing for cannabis is a crucial step.”
How could Connect’s philosophy be applied to the developing psychedelics market?
There are so many types of mushrooms that all have psychedelic properties to them, not just psilocybin. Psilocybin itself has, I dunno, up to over a hundred different type of psilocybin strains. Then you have andamedia mascareia, and all the other types of mentally stimulating mushrooms, like cordecyps and lion’s main.
I don’t know to what extent some of these mushrooms are or are not psychedelic. The pharmaceutical world might not call cordecyps psychedelic for instance, but it does change your mental disposition. All of this research is coming out, and there’s all these different types of mushrooms out there, call them strains.
I see a future where labs are testing for this on the regular, where data is being amassed on the differences chemically of these substances and then we’re able to release something like a connect for mushrooms. I think we’re talking about 2, 300 strains of psychedelic mushrooms that we could be talking about chemically, showing the chemical output of them, and then mapping that to research. That’s the work that needs to be done.
How will testing occur?
First and foremost it will be chemically identifying what are the active components that we need to know are present at what potency. Determining dosage and potency is anyone’s guess, really. LSD is a little more controlled, you’re dealing with a liquid that is being distributed technically speaking, as far as you know, in a standard way, and in a homogenous way.
For mushrooms, is it one cap? How many caps? Then, how big are caps? How many stems to go with the cap if you’re trying to get, say, 3 grams. We don’t really know that. We don’t know what the potency is on the weight. That all needs to be determined. They’ll be looking for active compounds of psilocybin at a specific potency level, and they’ll be looking for adulterants that shouldn’t be invoked in the chemistry like heavy metals, pesticides, the same things that we’re looking for in cannabis. Outside of psilocybin, however, I don’t know what compounds are also present that have some sort of potential Entourage Effect.
“All of the same things we learned in cannabis—we didn’t start there—we might find that the same thing exist in psilocybin. Each strain might produce essentially the same compound of psilocybin, but present with that psilocybin are these other things that probably aren’t terpenes, but are similar like that.”
“Some other compound that has an effect on the psilocybin itself, steers what it does, where it goes, how intense it is, whether it’s going to be a body feeling or a trippy hallucination feeling. I’ve had way different experiences on mushrooms depending on where I got them. I know those different experiences happen, it’s probably not because all psilocybin is the same.”
“At the very least, the initial stage of testing will be determining that there’s not toxic stuff in it and determining the potency that particular strain is at.”
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