Kevin McKernan
speaker
709 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Dec
Kevin McKernan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Trulieve, okay. The bill was written – perhaps it could have written the bill a little bit better. But what I don't think and what I tried to do is weigh in. I have some connections to DeSantis and Joe Latipo from some of the work we've done in the COVID space.
And I don't think they appreciate that the federal government just kneecaps all the cannabis companies a few years ago by basically legalizing hemp, which I'm all for. I think hemp should be legal. Right.
What they've done is they've created a two-tier regulatory structure where the people who are growing hemp don't have to safety test it, don't have to have the same labeling, they don't have to have licenses, they don't have to have cameras, they don't have to grow indoors. I mean, they don't have banking restrictions like the cannabis field has.
So what's happening in the cannabis field is everyone is kind of moving their business out of the regulated market and into the hemp market and selling it across state lines. Because if it's hemp, it can go across state lines. So what you'll find in Florida, you can go to any smoke shop down here and see people are selling THCP, HHC.
These are all like alternative cannabinoids that we don't know much about because they're technically not cannabis.
Delta-8 is one. So if you take CBD, you can take CBD, which comes out of hemp and is not psychoactive. Very, very helpful compound for epilepsy, a lot of different diseases. But you can acid catalyze that into Delta-8. which is psychoactive. And then that is technically derived from hemp. And you can sell that in an unregulated fashion across state lines everywhere.
And so everyone is sneaking forms of psychoactive THC through the hemp bill into all of these states that only have medical because there's a rec market there that wants it.
And so the whole Amendment 3 thing is a real kabuki theater because they were kind of shutting down moving the medical market here that is actually using tested and tracked material, moving that into the rec market so that you would have tested and tracked material in the rec market. And now that that's blocked, the hemp market is going to just swell in here and take over.
And I wouldn't be surprised if truly these other companies just say, screw it, throw in the towel and start calling their stuff hemp. and selling it. And then they don't have the same cost structure, testing oversight, and understanding of what's actually in the product. So net, I think it's worse for consumers what they did because they don't have... The one selling aspect...
of a regulated and tested market is that you know what's in the product. It's that they test it. They know there's no heavy metals, there's no pesticides. You know what the cannabinoid concentration actually is, and that's in fact THC and not some synthetic cannabinoid like spice that they popped in. All of those type of kitchen chemists sell things through the hemp market.
So even though things are labeled as hemp, you don't really know if it's even Delta-8. Sometimes it can be THC acetate, it can be THCP, it can be HHC. There's a long list of compounds that we don't really have thousands of years of biochemistry and toxicology on. So, yeah, it's a bit ironic. The reason I know Joe Latipo is that We ended up discovering this contamination of the vaccines.
And ironically, we would have never discovered that if we didn't have recreational cannabis in Massachusetts, which is a very bizarre story. But that whole discovery came about because we were sequencing cannabis plants to try to understand hop latent viroid.
hop late environment is a small rna molecule that infects the cannabis industry and it just devastates grows like 40 loss and crop yields right um and so what we were doing is taking these plants that were infected and looking at their rna signature throughout time to see what happens when this thyroid infects the plant why does it kill it like what is the 40 loss by what genes does it like turn down what genes does it activate where is it in the plant um
Those experiments were running great for about nine weeks, and then suddenly our sequencing data came back and it was no longer concentrated on genes. It was sequencing the entire genome. That's not what we wanted. We wanted to look at what genes were going up and down. So what you do when something like that happens in an experiment
is you have to go get a control that's a like a pharmaceutical grade rna and spike it in to see why is it broken like if that if that pharmaceutical grade rna doesn't come through then you can help pinpoint okay this is the step in the lab that's not functioning and that's why we're not capturing rna And I happen to have vaccines on the shelf for another reason. We can go into it another day.
People sent them to me anonymously in the mail because they thought I would do something with them. And they probably didn't expect me to do this with it. So I ended up using those. I spiked them into the well being like, all right, this is a perfect pharmaceutical. In theory, this is a perfect pharmaceutical grade RNA.
I'm going to spike this into our cannabis sequencing to see where the pipeline's broken. And when it came out, we found that contamination that Jack spoke about here. But that experiment would have been harder to do in Florida because we have recreational rules in mass, which allow us to actually do that type of research.
That's harder to get done down here because you have to have a medical card and it's much more tightly regulated. And so it saddened me when I saw that the Amendment 3 didn't go through. And what I loved about DeSantis and Joe Latipa was during the pandemic, they brought in, you know, a set of contrarians to say, you know, what's going on with the pandemic? You know, the fringe people.
Yes, until Biden came and took them, right? So anyway, they were very good. I have a lot of respect for them for what they did to the pandemic because they stopped and looked outside of the box and said, hey, something's wrong. Let's get some other experts in here. They brought in Jay Bhattacharya. They brought in Martin Kulldorff. They brought in Sunupja Kutra.
And that steered them in the right path. And I wish I had the time to do that with them on the canvas front because I think they got – I understand their concerns, which is that, hey, you don't want this to go willy-nilly with all the kids, right? You don't want the kids running around with vape pens in schools and making a big mess with the canvas front.
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