
This interview appeared in the December 2023 Cannabis Science and Technology Journal
Colli: David, can you tell us a little bit about your background in nursing and how you became a cannabis educator? I know mentioned a little bit in your story, but maybe you can expand a little bit further. David Benedicktus: I mentioned my brief experience working in inpatient oncology. Seeing that the system was kind of flirting with the idea, you know, in terms of managing some of the side effects of the chemotherapy and looking at the benefit of cannabis products for that. What really opened it up to me was drawing on my experience, working in both direct patient care and clinical settings and then looking at our health care policy and how it is set up to help mental health and chemical dependency patients.
So how it really came into focus was in teaching community education classes in the Lifelong Learning Program at Clark College here in Vancouver, Washington. Two of my students, husband and wife, Jay and Helen Elder took the class, my series of classes that I was doing, and they were early retirees. They were in their late 50s and they were saying, “holy crap, we don't have to die like our parents! We don’t have to experience cognitive decline, dementia, we can even reverse a lot of the chronic disease syndromes; we discovered inflammatory process are the cause.” So, I continued teaching at Clark and I hadn't heard from them for about a year, they came back to me and said, “We've organized all the complementary medicine practitioners in southwest Washington. We're creating a nonprofit called Complementary Medicine Practitioners of Southwest Washington and we'd like you to be on the board and help us develop educational programming for the community so people can understand there's prevention, wellness and alternative and complementary care that can help supplement the allopathic medicine approaches, which are legitimate in both acute care, and chronic care settings, and can reduce the amount of pharmaceuticals that people use and use lifestyle modalities instead.”
In fact, Kaiser Permanente, has a whole complementary medicine research group. I found out about the research group and I used to go and attend for a couple of years. They had their quarterly meetings over and in Portland and they would talk about the studies being done on complementary medicine approaches like acupuncture, biofeedback, meditation, electric eye movement desensitization (EMDR) therapy. So, I was saying, “Oh, my goodness, they're researching this.” So, we took that and we did outreach talks in the community.
We had the Clark College classes, health care classes that I had about 30 to 55 people attending those. That was great. We made a relationship with the library system, and I would set up to have talks at the library all throughout the Southwest Washington area, on the topics of anti-inflammatory lifestyle, and I said, “You know what, I'm just going to start including cannabis in that because the research is right there.” A lot of people come to these talks and they want to know about how to prevent chronic disease and also to prevent themselves from getting dementia which is a big, that's a big bad Baba Yaga kind of experience that people have about getting dementia, or seeing their parents die from it. So, I started teaching and the library said, “Fine, we're all about education and evidence-based science,” and we began teaching them throughout the library system.
The city of Vancouver said, “we'd like to have you guys come out and do that for our employees because we have a wellness program” and we said “we'll do it for free and we'll come out and do that.” For three or four years, we did talks, and I organized just like I did in the classes at Clark College. I did a kind of introductory talk about prevention and wellness, preventing cognitive decline, anti- inflammatory lifestyles. Then we'd have naturopaths and physicians and nurse practitioners come in and give specific talks in certain areas. People are pretty interested about memory and how to how to protect their memory. I'm going to do a class on memory and in the class on memory, I mentioned cannabis and I said to the employees there, “now you can't take cannabis yourselves because you're a city employee, but maybe your relatives who are retired can use this information or when you retire, you might be able to use this information about cannabis and how it’s neuro protective and an anti-inflammatory along with all these other anti-inflammatory lifestyles.” Well at that class there was a retired police officer and he came up to me afterwards he says, “I knew there was something more than just getting high with that.” He then contacted me and invited Jeremy and I to a policy meeting of the retired city of Vancouver police officers and firemen to talk with them about how they can lower their health care prescription cost by educating their retirees about medical cannabis, and that was in 2018.
We were little Johnny Appleseed's, going to spreading this information everywhere and landed up in that place, which was really very fun to do. So, how I really got into teaching cannabis was by learning that there was evidence-base, there was science on it. Even Sanjay Gupta was one on one of the top talk shows. Can't remember which one he was on, but I saw him on there and he was talking about Charlotte Figi in Colorado and how that was the only thing that helped her with her seven seizures that she had every hour or something like that. She had a pediatric seizures disorder. When I started looking into that, I saw that it was helpful, this was Sanjay Gupta, for this list of things for MS, for cancer symptoms, for irritable bowel syndrome. He's saying that it’s harm reduction in terms of opiate use and sometimes this is the only thing that works for people and it is. He said this and I said “well, I got permission now.” He said it is immoral not to tell people about this. So, when he said that, I said right there, I'll sign up.
Then Jeremy and I started realizing that the five-week, 10-hour class that we teach here at Clark College, about 10-12 students came to each one. People would keep calling us up afterwards or emailing us asking questions and stuff. We started a support group where we met in Jeremy's living room at his house here in Vancouver and we had, you know, five or 6-10 people show up for that and they were talking about growing, different products that they were using. People were concerned of course, because the high prices of cannabis especially in Washington with the excise tax on to it. Patients said, some things worked, some things didn't. Sometimes dispensaries ran out of products that worked and so they were trying to deal with all these issues as a medical cannabis patient. We thought “well, that would be a good thing to be able to offer the people consistent information on taking medical cannabis. We wanted to educate patients and the dispensary owners about what patients needs, policy makers, and health care providers, as to what info to provide to patients.”
That then evolved into us finding a space in a cannabidiol (CBD) store here in Vancouver, an American Shaman store that was run by a person who was open to having educational talks. For almost three years we did that. And that gained a lot of energy. We thought well, maybe we should start a nonprofit and pull this together and organize it. On the board we'll have all these people that have been coming in and classes and specialists and talking Jeremy and myself. Carol Stiff, who was the first person in 2017 in the class that told me about all other experts in the area. And then we got Tom Lauerman, a local organic farmer and patient advocate on the board, and we got connected with people like Victoria Star who was a pharmacist, and she was getting her secondary degree at the University of Maryland, in cannabis pharmacology. She's not on the board but she was a consultant for us. Then people like Megan Marchetti, who was one of the original founders of NORML in Oregon and ran a dispensary, she managed Oregon's Finest. We had this wealth of knowledge that we could use to educate the public and health care providers about medical cannabis.
We’ve been doing that for about three years now and been teaching classes and writing blogs and a monthly newsletter and things like that. Again, with the purpose of to help people decrease their suffering, right. It's to provide alternatives to the traditional medicine approaches that have limited benefit for chronic diseases as we know. Cannabinoids can be a mono therapy, and can replace, in many cases, a lot of the medications, pharmaceutical that patients are taking.
There's documentary on Prime Video called “Unprescribed” about veterans I just saw, that was just stunning. We've been giving talks to veteran’s groups for a while. We'll talk about that later, but the fact that veterans can replace 9 to 15 pharmaceutical medications by taking regular doses of different types of cannabis, is just stunning. Sanjay Gupta said it doesn't work for everybody but when it does it’s great, and its harm reduction, it saves people's lives. In the words of the veterans’ families in this documentary called “Unprescribed,” highly recommend it, it turned them from zombies into regular human beings.
As Jeremy was talking about, all the medications that he was taking that were prescribed, had some benefit during the early part of recovery, eventually turns people into walking side effect factories and they can't think clearly. The personal testimony was just stunning. And then of course, Sue Sisley’s talking about her research. She reports that only two drugs have been approved for post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and they only have 20% efficacy. So, all that gives us scientific and ethical grounds to go out and do outreach reach, talk with people, teach classes. And people are stunned by the information. They say, well, no one ever told us this.
Cannabis and Science Technology https://www.cannabissciencetech.com/view/empowerment-through-education-it-s-not-food-science-it-s-cannabis-science-
Dr. Sue Sisley MD is an Arizona-based physician practicing Internal Medicine & Psychiatry.
The Unprescribed is dedicated to promoting holistic wellness through herbal remedies, post-traumatic growth and suicide prevention through integrative medicine.
Tom Lauerman https://www.farmertomorganics.com/
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