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Nurses in Cannabis Education Struggle Within an Evolving Industry
by April Hatch , MSN , RN , contributing writer
Happy five-year anniversary , The EVOLUTION Magazine ! What a wild ride it has been as an advocate for cannabis education . Five years ago , I was deep into caring for my grandmother , who I consider to be my second cannabis patient , and thanks to The EVOLUTION Magazine , I was able to share a bit of her story in a Cannabis and Seniors article .
After Oklahoma passed a prescription drug monitoring program making it very difficult for her to get the pain pills she had taken for 12 years , she ended up in the hospital with a type of heart failure called Takotsubo . Not uncommon during opioid withdrawal , caused by severe emotional and physical distress — it was then I knew our conversations about cannabinoids needed to get more serious . She was scared , like most of the older women I continue to talk to today who were around during the Reefer Madness era . My conversations with my grandmother and seeing how cannabinoids , specifically a combination of CBD and THC , helped other family members when prescriptions could not , inspired the launch of the Cannabis Care Team in 2019 .
I wish I could say that with adult use passing in 2022 and my patients no longer being scared to get a medical card , we have been able to reach more patients , but that just isn ’ t the case . Before adult use and many medical cannabis dispensary owners had to sell their licenses due to operating costs , we had dispensaries like COCO paying for its patients to have cannabis consultations with a nurse . Brooke Foster , formerly of COCO dispensaries and labs , was voted Woman of the Year in 2022 by the cannabis industry and is one of the most honest and principled persons I have worked with in cannabis . She had to sell the COCO licenses to a group of owners that now owns 40 dispensaries , according to Google .
It was 2018 when I met Brooke and her team at an open house at one of COCO ’ s dispensaries before it was licensed to sell cannabis . Building a relationship with the public and getting them out so they could see what a cannabis dispensary looked like was really important to her . Staff education was also very important to her , and that ’ s what I spent most of my time doing from 2019 to 2022 . I drove all over the
10 June 2024
April Hatch , RN , Cannabis Care Team , teaching police officers at an Extracted-ED Green Lab Workshop about the medical value of cannabis .
state of Missouri and occasionally Oklahoma , providing a day ’ s long class on medical cannabis with a few other advocates , mainly Matt Cascio , another fellow nurse .
Selling cannabis education is tough . There were , of course , our main supporters like COCO , Blue Sage , Clovr , Hippos , and Elevate , but for many dispensaries , our education was not in their budget . Even though we had evidence to support that knowledgeable budtenders actually increased revenue in dispensaries in other states . According to a study published in 2018 , 90 % of budtenders make recommendations based on their own experience , and we always felt they could make even better recommendations if that experience were coupled with the vast amount of research available .
It ’ s the need for more research on the current products consumers have access to that led me to my call today with Amy Moore , the Director of the Division of Cannabis Regulation , to discuss where the research licenses are . In Nov 2022 , Missourians voted yes to the adult-use bill , which included awarding micro-licenses and research licenses . The state has been busy , and Amy Moore said they held their first listening session regarding the research licenses in April . At this point , they are in the gathering information stage , as Article XIV gave them very little guidance on how to issue those licenses . They hope to have draft rules published by the summer , followed by a few rounds of gathering feedback from the public . To provide your feedback visit :
● https :// www . surveymonkey . com / r / KLK85VP
● or email cannabisdevelopment @ health . mo . gov .
As stated above , there is a vast amount of research on cannabis , and the last time I checked , 37,000 peer-reviewed articles were published on pubmed . gov . That ’ s the primary source from which I gathered my material for training budtenders , but I also gathered a lot of real-world experience from patients . I think we had about 300 patient consultations under our belt when I finally got fed up with hearing patient horror stories . “ I didn ’ t know how much to take .” “ I thought I was going to die .” “ I was in the ER for four hours .”
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