June and I are in Las Vegas for some cannabis education. We are attending the 6th annual Marijuana Business Conference & Expo. And what I find so interesting is that everybody here is well-groomed and in business attire. You wouldn’t know this isn’t Washington D.C.

This is not a group of stoners with long hair and wild colors. The industry is maturing. These are business people walking around. There is a lot more regulation, and the more regulation the more uniformity and safety there is.

The conference website calls it the longest-running, biggest and most respected conference for the cannabis industry, with 7,500 cannabis industry leaders attending. “The entire marijuana business ecosystem under one roof,” they call it.

Impressions from my first day

• We really don’t know what all we don’t know. The possibilities of using cannabis medicinally are great. It is so exciting to be on the cutting edge.
• We all (humans and many animals, too) have an endocannabinoid system, which is a series of receptors that accept cannabinoids only. It’s the reason our bodies so easily process cannabis. The way the cannabis plant and our endocannabinoid system interacts is really interesting. Read the Beginner’s Guide to the Endocannabinoid System to learn more.
• Terpenes, which cause cannabis’ odor among other effects, interact with other compounds in cannabis. But we don’t yet know what the entourage effect is when terpenes interact with the various cannabinoids. “Cannabis is inherently polypharmaceutical,” Dr. John McPartland, DO, noted in the journal Phytomedicine, “and synergy arises from interactions between its multiple components.”
• Indica vs. Sativa – it’s not that simple! Those are the two main cannabis species, but as a speaker at the Marijuana Science Convention in Portland pointed out, there are an incredible number of hybrids and crosses from from combining the two. When they showed all the dots indicating all the different combinations on a screen, it looked like the Milky Way on a dark night above Mauna Kea.

There are so many things we don’t know yet. This is mainly because marijuana has been illegal and so we haven’t been able to do the studies.

Science is how we will make sense of it all. It’s very exciting and the potential is tremendous.