treat his leukemia. “It really started working for
me after about six months, and it’s worked so
well for me … I’m doing really good. I’m really
healthy, I’m able to eat now, and I’m feeling a lot
better.” And, by all measures, he is: Jamie has
put on over thirty pounds, including ten pounds
of muscle mass, and keeps up regularly with his
physician to monitor his continued progress.
However, Jamie’s experience with the RSO
was mixed. “I started realizing that all that THC
is really, really good medicine, but it’s very in-
toxicating.” We should note that no one, least of
all Jamie, is trying to downplay the signifi cance
of THC to the medical community: “I think
you need that intoxication to heal and to put
your body at ease” he says. However, the
intoxicating effects of THC made taking
it at the high doses he needed diffi cult
to manage at times. Jamie grew cu-
rious about the role of other, non-
psychoactive cannabinoids in
his recovery.
Through testing the RSO
he had been taking, Jamie
and his colleagues no-
ticed that the oil had
high concentrations
of CBD, CBG, CBN,
“all different canna-
binoids, and I’m a
fi rm believer that you
need lots of CBG, lots
of CBC, so full spectrum.”
It’s this full-spectrum phi-
losophy that lies at the
heart of Jamie’s mission:
to produce strains of hemp that are identical to
their marijuana counterparts except for one cru-
cial difference — their cannabinoid composition.
After doing some hemp farming and “realizing
what this plant can do, I really got into the hemp
side of it because of the CBD profi le and the
CBDs — you can really get everything out of it.”
Jamie had found a way to produce different
hemp strains with varying cannabinoid content,
and therefore the potential to target a variety of
symptoms and ailments. Canna Comforts, the
company Jamie founded to bring his work to
market, is focused not on THC (which contin-
ues to dominate the market), but on the lesser-
known cannabinoids that pack a therapeutic
punch despite their relative lack of press. Ja-
mie’s strains have had an impact on the medi-
cal cannabis community, helping everyone from
children suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy
to elderly patients with chronic ailments and
everyone in between, including his own mother
and father.
So just how similar are Jamie’s hemp strains
to their corre-
sponding marijuana cous-
ins? Well,
so far Jamie has had
multiple
shipments confi s-
cated by law en-
forcement, only
to be returned
after they were
proven legal
through testing.
“The fl ower looks
just like the very
high-THC flower.
It’s got the same
nose, the same
aromas, the same
terpene profile, the
same look, the sticki-
ness, the trichomes
— it’s all there.” Short
of laboratory testing, Ja-
mie’s hemp is indistinguish-
able from marijuana flower,
and that’s a point of pride. “That’s
what we’re really good at is our
hemp fl ower,” he says before list-
ing a plethora of top-shelf strains he
grows, from Electra to Silver Haze.
Jamie is a believer in consumption of
whole cannabis, which is why his hemp strains
are so important to him, to his business and, he
hopes, to medical cannabis consumers every-
where. “Everybody’s so hyped up on isolate,”
he says, “and it is great, it is a great product. It’s
obviously an isolated product so it’s pure CBD
— you’re getting the good stuff.” However, he
says, “I think you need the other profi les. You
need something to get rid of the infl ammation
and you need to be able to stimulate the CB1
and the CB2 receptors.”
Consumption of the cannabis plant as whole
fl ower or full-spectrum extracts instead of pure
isolates, Jamie believes, is the most powerful
way to reap the maximum benefi t from can-
NUGL Magazine 27