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(soft piano music)
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- I never thought I'd be here.
I didn't have any desire to be some pot healer guy.
That wasn't what I was trying to do.
I've done a lot of things in my life,
and this feels the best.
(solemn piano music)
My name's Pete Sais.
I've been helping people for about 10 years.
At 28, I got clean in Narcotics Anonymous,
and I cut out all drugs,
every single mind- or mood-altering substance,
for about 15 years,
and then I found out about cannabis,
and I started helping people.
When I got to my fourth remission,
I started using cannabis again myself.
- And my name is Doctor Sherry Yafai,
I am an ER doctor,
who has segued into cannabis work.
I work with patients with cannabis, only,
in the office at the Relief Institute
here in Santa Monica, California.
When I work with patients with cannabis,
I try to minimize other medications,
especially if medications are creating problems,
side effects, unwanted, depression, anxiety, et cetera.
So what we do here in the office
is focus primarily on using different parts of the plant
in different formats, and different modes of administration,
to get exactly what we want for patients.
- My name is Ali Becher.
I am 36 years old,
and I have been through cancer
probably four times.
- My name is Monica Gray,
and I'm a breast cancer survivor.
- Cancer used to be one in 50 people would get cancer.
And then they outlawed cannabis,
and now we're one in three people getting cancer.
- So I've started all of this about three or four years ago,
when two very close family members
were diagnosed with cancer.
Both of them were recommended by their physicians
to start using cannabis products.
Both their oncologists say, you should probably smoke pot,
and it'll help.
And that was the end of the conversation.
And so when I went in and discussed of of this
with the oncologist,
the same question kept coming up.
Well, what are they supposed to do?
How are they supposed to do it?
How often are they supposed to use it?
What is it good for, what is it not good for?
What should we look out for?
We don't want her to be high all day
because she's got little kids around.
How do we do this better?
And both of them did the same thing,
they shrugged their shoulders and they said, I don't know.
We usually tell people to just Google
and figure it out for themselves.
- Every single person I've helped,
I know would not be here right now,
if it wasn't for me helping them.
- It became a big struggle,
a struggle on the end of how to take it and when to take it,
how much to take,
and what ended up happening,
which we know happens for a lot of individuals
is we went into a quote-unquote pot shop,
talked to a bud tender,
who sometimes gave us good advice
and sometimes didn't give us good advice.
And that was where I thought,
if something's so good,
is being touted by so many people as being helpful,
especially in terms of cancer control,
or cancer symptomatic treatment control,
then why is it that we're not able to do this better?
And why is it that the physician group,
the medical-clinical world,
is turning their backs on these patients?
And that was what prompted me to make a change
in my personal career,
and my path in understanding all of this.
- This is my little guy, Jessie,
and he's a rescue dog,
very affectionate.
He just likes being with me.
- I know a lot of people,
and I made it to where if I know you,
and someone you love is sick,
I'll help them, or if you're sick I'll help you.
And it's worked, I've never had to tell anyone no.
I'm either here to heal you,
or ease you out, not the easiest thing.
- I am a community advocate in Ventura County,
and I advocate for patients' rights.
I thought that I had access to the best medicine there was.
I found that I didn't really know enough to save myself.
You never really know what you'll do
when you're given a cancer diagnosis
until it actually happens to you.
- It started when I was in college.
I noticed that I had like a tiny white bump on my face.
I was 18 years old,
and they told me that it was nothing,
like a cyst, it would go away.
- I was diagnosed at stage three.
I had really really large breasts,
so my doctor kept telling me
that I just had cystic, or fibrous tissue.
I just had big lumpy boobs,
and she told me I was fine.
- Then three years later,
I transferred to a four-year university,
and the bump was still there
and I felt like it was getting bigger.
So, I went to a new doctor,
and they said they didn't think it was anything
but they would biopsy it,
just to see what it was.
So he called me a few weeks later,
and said that it was a rare form of melanoma,
and that I had to have surgery to remove it.
I had the surgery, it left a pretty big scar,
and then they said I had to do radiation
because they weren't sure of they got all of it.
I was young and dumb, and I didn't know,
I didn't know any better,
I just knew that the doctor was telling me I needed that.
So, I did it, and then they kind of assured me,
and they said that the cancer won't come back.
This is it, we took care of it.
And I said, okay great.
So I went on with my life, and graduated college,
and 10 years later, I noticed
I had kind of a mass growing in my jaw.
So I went to the doctor, and again they said,
"well, it's not your cancer coming back.
"I would be able to tell,
"it's definitely not your cancer,
"you're just being paranoid."
They gave me antibiotics,
and like two weeks later the antibiotics didn't do anything.
The mass was painful.
So I called the doctor and I said,
you need to order an actual scan
because there's something going on and I think it's cancer.
He ordered a scan.
The scan confirmed there was a large mass.
And then they said, we need to do a biopsy.
So they did a biopsy,
and then they called me and said
that the cancer had come back and it was stage four.
- By this time the biggest lump was the size of a walnut,
and I had three of 'em total.
They were getting big, fast.
After all that stress that my body had just been through,
it was finally like, okay.
Before they were like the size of like a pea,
and she says, they're just cystic little lumps, it's fine.
By this time, she was like, okay,
so she finally got me my test authorized,
and it was actually the test that the hospital,
the individuals that were running the tests themselves,
when I told them how long I'd been begging,
how long I'd had to wait,
and also the fact that I had three kids at home.
I asked them, if you feel like
I need to be advanced to the next round,
or the next test sooner,
please help me,
and they did.
- And that's when everything kind of went downhill.
They said it was like really advanced,
and they were gonna have to like
take off half of my face
to get it under control.
I just had my last surgery to fix it,
so you can kind of see.
Six months ago, this didn't exist.
This piece of skin right here is actually from my thigh.
So they had to take a whole bunch of stuff off.
But when they did the first surgery
to take out the jaw mass,
they told me that they were gonna
have to take the nerves and the skin
and basically everything,
so I would be like a walking skeleton.
I wouldn't have anything left in my face.
And I said, can you guarantee
that it won't come back if you do that, and he told me, no.
So I said, I want you to do the,
I want you to save all the nerves that you can,
just save everything that you can.
So he did.
He said, "I'm gonna do what you want."
So it was a 12-hour operation,
and as you can see,
I don't have any nerves going to my bottom lip,
and I don't have a nerve going to my eyelid,
so I have an implant in my eye to help me blink.
That was the surgery, it was really really rough.
And then they said, okay now you have to do chemo.
And I said okay,
so I did chemo for a year.
A couple of months before I stopped the chemo,
I noticed that I had a cough,
and I'm a respiratory therapist,
and my cough was productive, and wet,
and I just felt like something was wrong,
so I told my oncologist.
I said I think something's wrong,
he's like, "you're fine."
So I finished the chemo, and then two months later,
he said okay, we're gonna do a chest X-ray.
They did a chest X-ray,
it had metastasized to the lungs.
- I had a tumor in my kidney in 2012,
so I went and had a scan,
and they found a tumor.
They took out my kidney,
and they thought they had gotten it all.
But the cancer had metastasized to my chest.
The nodules were so small,
that they gave me a pill form of chemotherapy.
It was the mildest form.
- That's their go-to, federally,
they can't just hand everybody cannabis oil.
That's what they say.
For everyone, it's almost like a one-size-fits-all.
They want you to do chemo,
they want you to do radiation,
and if you want surgery, we'll do that too.
- I got deathly sick on it.
So over a matter of about a year,
I went from 186 pounds
down to 110.
Well instead of like on chemo, people lose their hair.
My hair thinned out a little bit.
But say like my tan right now, say I'm a seven.
I probably went to a two.
Or one.
Anyway, my hair was white.
And my sister had passed away,
but when she was in the hospital,
I went to her to visit her,
and my nephews, we were passing each other,
they didn't recognize me.
People actually did not recognize me.
- Chemo sucks.
Every bite of food feels like sand.
Water doesn't quench your thirst.
Losing your hair sucks.
- I was done.
I was tired of it.
- I used to talk to a lot of patients on the phone
about their experience with cancer and chemo,
and they would always tell me things like,
it's not the cancer that's killing me, it's the chemo.
Our drivers would come back with stories
of people getting skinnier and skinnier,
and sicker and sicker.
It was really hard.
You tend to absorb a lot of that kind of stuff
when you really care about people.
So when I was diagnosed it was pretty intense.
- I was down making a delivery down in Otay Mesa,
which is down by San Diego.
A couple of months before that,
when I urinated, I saw a little bit of blood,
but I just kind of blew it off.
When I went down that particular night,
I went to the bathroom, it was solid blood.
My wife and I, we were engaged at the time.
She lived in Oregon.
I called her up, and I said hey I'm urinating blood.
So she looked it up,
and we thought I was passing a stone.
So anyway, one of my buddies I called up,
and I says hey I need to go to the doctor,
and goes, okay we'll go.
And he took me to emergency.
I told him what was going on,
and they thought I was passing a stone.
But one of them says, you know what?
We're gonna do a CT scan,
and they came right back out and just told me,
you have a tumor.
You know he was just like,
that blunt.
So I told my wife.
She says well, we were planning on getting married.
As a matter of fact, yesterday was our anniversary.
We were planning on getting married
later on in the month.
She goes, "I'm coming down now."
So she came down and then,
the day we were supposed to get married
I had my kidney taken out.
So she was there for me you know, she was God-sent,
just like Pete.
- The doctor at that time said,
"we need to put you on this treatment to take care of it,
"because this isn't good, which I already knew."
I told him I wanted another opinion,
that I wanted somebody else to tell me
that that's what was happening.
So I wanted him to give me his doctor notes for the visit.
So he gave me the notes and I picked 'em up,
was reading 'em in the car,
and the note basically said, "this patient is dying.
"I've scheduled her for palliative chemo,
"and there's no hope for her."
(somber piano music)
I started screaming, this guy sucks.
So I thought, I'm going somewhere else,
and we're getting another opinion,
so I went to a new doctor and he said,
"we can treat this, you are very sick,
"but we can treat this."
The other doctor,
the reason he didn't want to give me the treatment
that the new doctor gave me,
because he said it was too aggressive.
And I said, I'm 30 years old and I'm dying,
like I don't care.
Like, give me something.
So I did that treatment.
It made me very, very sick.
I'm already pretty thin,
I lost like 20 pounds in two weeks,
and I couldn't keep anything down.
- I only did three treatments of chemo,
and it was under extreme duress that I did it.
I was actually threatened with action by DCFS.
They threatened to take my kids,
if I didn't submit to a toxic treatment,
because they said that my kids would likely suffer more,
watching me get sicker and sicker,
and if I was denying treatment for myself
then that would denote some kind of like
mental deficiency,
and unless you have ever been forced to do it,
with the knowledge that it also can cause secondary cancers
years after, they don't tell you that.
You get advice from well-meaning people
in all corners of your life,
also shaming you and coercing you
and being like you really should for your kids.
You really should?
You see how it feels.
They make you take shots of stuff
that's supposed to boost
your immune system, called Neulasta,
that will make you sick almost immediately after.
It's literally like everything that they demand that you do,
will make you sicker.
And it feels,
it feels like you're living in a nightmare.
- They said, "if we keep giving you this treatment,
"you're gonna die from the treatment."
So they said, "we're gonna go ahead and stop it."
And I said, okay, great.
And then, I didn't do treatment
for probably four or five months,
and then all the tumors were stable,
they weren't getting better, but they were just stable,
and then they started getting bigger.
So they said you need to do a clinical trial.
You've already failed three treatments,
well four treatments.
We're gonna put you on this clinical trial.
And I said, all right.
There's got to be like something else,
I'm feeling all these like
super-advanced kinds of medicine,
they had all just come out
and they were saying all these great things about 'em,
but none of them were working for me.
And that's when I contacted Pete.
- My wife had been researching RSO oil.
So she says I want you to try this,
and I talked to a couple of friends,
and they were talking about gimp oil, cannabis oil.
We didn't know where to get it,
so I just happened to have a nephew that knew Pete.
- I've been giving people my version
of a blend of RSO or FECO is,
it's the holy anointing oil.
- This is a tough one.
There are huge believers and advocates,
and the problem becomes,
at what point is any medication toxic?
We don't have a toxic, or a lethal dose right now,
in terms of THC or CBD,
but at some point we have to stop and say,
if a chemo treatment was making you nauseous
and vomiting and sleeping all day,
and giving you poor quality of life,
you would call that chemo treatment terrible.
Why is it that we don't have the same feeling
about Rick Simpson Oil?
It is a hugely concentrated, very expensive medication,
that may be helpful for some.
I can't tell you.
I can't stand behind something
that makes my patients feel so unwell,
when the whole goal of treatment
is to give them less nausea, less vomiting,
better interactions with their family and friends,
more time being awake, and less time sleeping.
If we can give them that without having
the negative side effects, by all means,
I'm looking forward to finding the
quote-unquote curative treatment for cancer,
but until we get there,
and until we do this matching up
with cancer and cannabis treatment,
then I have a really hard time getting behind it.
- A gram of cannabis a day,
a gram of cannabis oil
that all the fats and stuff's been removed,
so it's like pretty pure oil.
It's really strong.
Especially some people are really sensitive.
If you didn't use cannabis for years,
most likely what happened is when you were in high school,
you smoked weed and had a bad reaction,
and said oh I don't like that stuff.
It's not for me.
And then later, when I tell you
you have to get over this hump,
man sometimes it's hard for people to get over that hump.
It's not the easiest thing because,
like I say it makes you hallucinate.
It's really, really strong,
it's not an easy task but
once you get past it,
there's this hump you get past, then it's okay,
but you gotta get over the hump, man, it's hard.
When I first started taking
the oil it was for my blood pressure,
and my blood sugar.
I was trying to get off of the 15 pills
from big pharma I was taking a day.
And so I worked with my doctor
to slowly take away those medicines,
while I upped the does of cannabis,
and that doctor's now retired but,
I'm eternally grateful for him working with me,
because doctors at that time weren't doing that.
- So when I talk to my colleagues,
my other fellow physicians, about cannabis,
I get a lot of this.
I don't know.
I get a lot of, well I can't talk about that
because it's illegal.
I get a lot of,
I can't attend that conference
because they're talking about cannabis,
and that would create a problem for my practice.
All of these fears that have been instilled in us
as a medical community,
I am working diligently on proving wrong.
Healthcare providers in general right now
are not doing a very good job of discussing it,
and part of the reason for that
is that we've been told this myth,
that we're not allowed to.
And the first thing that comes out of my mouth,
when somebody says, I can't talk about that is,
"do you talk about heroin with your patients?"
And guess what, a lot of physicians
talk about heroin with their patients, you know why?
Because the medical board requires us
to talk about heroin with our patients,
because we're at an all-time opiate epidemic,
where patients are dying.
So not only can we not not talk about heroin,
we are mandated to talk about heroin,
and that we're mandated to prescribe antidotes to heroin,
and regular opiates as well,
depending on how many pills a patient is taking.
But that comes from the top down.
And what happens right now is that the top down
is still not talking about it,
because it's still federally illegal,
because things are not changing at the same pace
as the patients are,
so patients are changing rapidly,
and we're seeing rapid movement in what they're using,
but we're not going through medical education routes,
because they didn't want us to talk about this.
So, it becomes a real challenge.
When are we are we going to be encouraged
to talk about this with our patients?
When is this gonna be required?
When is this gonna be taught in medical school?
In residency, and internship, and fellowship?
When is it gonna be part of the discussion?
When is it going to come to the table
besides under the guise or the fakeness of recreational use?
When will we start talking about the medical indications?
And that's been on the shoulders of the patients
for a long time.
- My sister knew Pete,
and she was like, "go see this guy.
"He'll tell you what you need to know."
And I was like, all right I'll go see him.
So I went to San Francisco and met him.
He was like the most warm individual.
When I came through the door,
he's like, I'm a hugger, give me a hug.
I said okay.
And we sat down and he basically told me what,
I told him my story up until that point,
and he just said, "okay, this is what we're gonna do."
And he sent me on the way with the oil,
and it was really tough.
I have never done any kind of drugs in my life,
and I remember, I was living with my mom at the time,
and I was taking like a drop a day.
And I would call her from my bedroom,
and be like, you have to come check on me,
something's wrong.
And she'd come up, she said, "no, you're just stoned."
I said, okay, okay, I'm fine.
I'm just stoned.
So eventually I got up to what he recommended,
and then I was dumb and I thought that
once you got up that amount,
you didn't have to take the CBD anymore.
And it was working, like my tumors weren't getting bigger,
some of them were shrinking.
- With cannabis, I make the holy anointing oil,
like Skunk Pharm Research does.
It has cinnamon leaf oil,
cinnamon bark oil,
myrrh gum oil, olive oil,
and cannabis oil.
Most people won't understand what I'm saying,
when I say the holy anointing oil is from the Bible,
it's from Exodus 30.
In the Bible it talks about how
they had to make with
kaneh-bosem, cinnamon.
Back then the perfumers would have used the whole tree,
so in our recipe,
we use cinnamon bark and cinnamon leaf oil,
so you get both.
The myrrh gum oil,
and the olive oil.
And so they used to give it to the priests.
They used to give it to the priests
and they would anoint people,
and it would heal them back then.
And so that's where our recipe comes from,
and the craziest thing is every single person
I've given it to has gotten better.
Every single one gets better,
even if they don't make it,
they're still better than they were before.
I learned how to do all that from Skunk Pharm Research.
That recipe that I use, is from them.
They were talking about how it cured cancer,
and it was on the IC Mag,
it was on a bunch of the bulletin boards back then.
- One of my favorite topics.
So, cannabis and cancer.
It is crazy how much is on WebMD, Google.
Everybody these days gets a diagnosis of cancer
and immediately the next thing that they're gonna do
is go online and Google it,
and try and figure out what is going on
and what they need to do, and what sorts of treatment.
And there is so much that is being talked about,
in terms of cannabis treatment, with cancer.
I like to take a very different perspective on this.
And one of my perspectives is,
is first of all, we know for a fact
that this is going to be helpful for nausea and vomiting
associated with chemotherapy.
We know it's gonna be helpful for pain.
We know it's gonna be helpful for anxiety and depression.
Those are three things that very commonly
affect people with cancer, as they go through treatment.
Now there was a recent article by Doctor Abrams
out of UC San Francisco, I believe,
who stated almost exactly the same thing.
Instead of treating patients
with three different types of pills,
to treat each one of those things,
we can treat them with just one thing,
and that's cannabis products.
And wouldn't that be a nice way to just
ease off for patients, instead of adding to their pill load?
Because there is a pill load.
People come in and they say,
well which one of my 50 pills do you want to know about?
And I want to know about all of them.
But what I want to do is actually simplify that regimen,
because every time you take a pill,
I promise you, people feel depressed,
and I promise you people feel like they're broken,
like they're not whole,
like they're going through something,
and they're struggling
with something nobody else understands.
And so if you can help simplify that regimen,
in of itself, you're doing somebody a great benefit.
- I didn't believe it.
I didn't believe it at first.
I thought the stoners were just trying to keep their weed,
and then I met my first patient
that cured their cancer with cannabis.
And once I looked someone in the eye that actually did it,
and they told me their story, and I believed 'em,
I knew that I was kind of in a unique position
to help people.
I knew that I could get
the things required to make it.
I had family that had grown pot for years,
and threw away the part that we would use to make the oil,
which, we call it trim.
They trim the buds to make the pretty
flowers that they put in the bags
that they sell to the stoners.
Well all the trimmings are what we use to make the oil.
It's still good, it's still good medicine,
just they trim it off the flowers
so I could get it free at the time.
Once I found out that it worked,
then I wanted to try.
So then I made some,
and started looking around for a cancer patient.
And the Skunk Farm way was to give
give medicine free.
Medicine shouldn't be charged for.
The first class I went to,
there I met my first cancer patient that had taken the oil,
and gotten all the way to remission,
and she had a horrible story about how she got there.
I bought a machine that day,
and made the commitment that
half of everything that would go through my machine,
I'd give away free.
I've given away more than half
that's come through that machine,
but that was the original intent
was at least half give away free.
The problem is,
most cancer patients don't have money.
Most real patients don't have money.
If I have eight patients that don't have money,
and two that do,
that's enough.
I'm not worried about the money.
When I first started I had family
that had grown for years,
and they threw away their trim.
They didn't use it.
No one was really using it then.
No one cared about trim.
So when I first started I went,
and I got like 50, a hundred pounds free,
and I would just turn it into oil,
and I'd have all the oil,
any time anyone needed it, I'd just give it away,
whether they had money or not.
And it just worked out,
I never had to tell anyone no.
(soft jazz music)
- He gave me this oil,
and he wanted me to get down to 12 drops a day.
At first, I took one, there was no big deal.
Two, it was okay.
And then when I started taking more,
I started getting super high.
Like he said, I called him up, and I was like,
I was only taking like two drops,
and I was supposed to take two more.
Wow, I can't get any higher than what I'm getting.
It got to the point,
my wife couldn't even go to the bathroom,
because I didn't want to be left alone.
You know, just so paranoid.
It depends on your personality, how it reacts.
Some people relax, some people get nervous.
I get nervous.
- Pete saved my life, because, like I said,
I thought I had access to really great medicine,
and a good consistent supply of it,
and I didn't.
- Give me a little bit of the same leeway,
as we give to physicians prescribing narcotics.
We don't have the same leeway right now.
If I write this recommendation,
I'm coming under strict, super-strict,
rules and regulations,
even more strict than my colleagues,
and even myself when I was only in the emergency department.
- I had gone to the doctor,
and at first this Votrient that I was taking,
kind of worked a little bit, and then it quit.
And it was kind of useless,
I couldn't keep nothing down, nothing tasted good.
It was terrible.
I quit taking it.
And I told him, I'm not gonna take it any more.
And he says, "well what do you need me for?"
And I said, well just to monitor to see where I'm at.
But I didn't tell him that I was starting
to take the CBD oil.
And then so after a couple of CT scans,
I started getting better.
And he finally says,
"are you self-medicating?"
And we started laughing, I said, yeah.
And we told him what we were doing,
he goes, "oh sometimes it just, people just reverse."
But that wasn't the case.
- I see so much going on in the hemp/CBD world right now,
in the US, because of the recent Farm Bill Act,
and now it's kind of been this huge upsurge
with CBD and cancer.
And what I like to remind people,
it's one part, or one chemical part of the whole plant,
and up until very recently,
we weren't even paying any attention to it.
Because most of anything you thought of as cannabis,
prior to 2010 really, was THC.
It was just a matter of how much THC we're getting.
And it's really been in the last decade
that we're now starting to see this
new surge in data, this new surge in interest,
in something different,
and mostly because it's not intoxicating.
The problem becomes that just because it's not intoxicating,
doesn't mean it's the right fit for everyone.
So I do gently remind everybody
that CBD is a great medication,
in and of itself for the right purpose.
But it is not a one-size-fits-all answer.
CBD and cancer can be very helpful
in terms of pain management,
in terms of anxiety management,
and we try to basically maximize
where we can get benefit from this.
So depending on what somebody's going through with cancer,
the problem becomes when we stigmatize THC,
because we think CBD is the answer.
And that's something really important to avoid doing.
THC is not evil, it shouldn't be stigmatized against.
When used appropriately
it has profound results and profound usages.
And again, as we delve deeper into this,
into this book of cannabis,
we start seeing THC-A, and CBD-A,
as being other potentials,
as well as things like CBG, and CBN,
and hopefully soon one day, CBDV.
As we continue to grow and expand this field,
I think we're gonna see a lot of benefits
from things that we didn't know even existed,
until recently.
- The lung tumors were growing,
so the doctor said, "we need to take this one,
"a specific tumor, out,
"because it's causing a lot of trouble."
So it was a really large tumor in my left lung,
so they took out the left lower lobe,
but I still had tumors,
in the left and in the right, and in my neck.
But at that time they said,
we don't have any other options for you.
I figured with Pete, I didn't have anything to lose.
I was either gonna die,
or I was gonna do everything Pete said to do.
- I would say this.
If you have cancer, and it's not brain cancer,
or estrogen-positive breast cancer,
get a thousand milligrams of THC in your body a day,
for at least 90 days straight.
I would say if you have estrogen-based cancer,
or breast cancer, or brain cancer,
get a two to one ratio CBD to THC,
and take a thousand milligrams a day
for at least 90 days.
In both cases, remove all sugar from your diet.
Eat food with nutritional value.
If it's not working get rid of the meat,
and just eat veggies.
And try to think positively too.
I believe that helps.
- And then that's when I kind of got really serious
with the diet and everything.
I cut out like all sugar,
I had a list of like every food,
and like every gram of sugar
that would be in that food.
I wouldn't eat fruit, I cut out bread, pasta, soda,
I only would drink water.
So I had the lung surgery,
and then three months later,
with just doing what Pete told me to do,
all the tumors were gone.
There wasn't any evidence of tumors left.
- I started putting on weight,
and I gained 25 pounds in two weeks.
And the doctor went crazy.
My regular doctor.
So anyway, in a matter of about
I don't know, six months, I was back to my weight,
or 160-170 pounds,
then just recently at like 205,
so I kind of cooled it.
But instead of going to the doctor every month,
or every week,
I go every six months now.
He just says,
that I was a walking miracle.
- For some reason, when I used their recipe
of holy anointing oil,
magic happens faster than with regular FECO.
Since it's proved itself, I stick with what works.
- I asked the doctor, I'm like,
well what do you think about this?
He said, oh it's probably the treatment
coming back around and working.
I'm like, no it's really not,
'cause I failed the treatment,
tumors were growing on the treatment.
It doesn't just flip a switch.
(upbeat jazz music)
- I was eight.
I was with a friend,
and we were in a tree house down the street,
Tony Garish had some weed.
I didn't know what it was.
I was eight.
I just took a couple of puffs,
and then I don't even remember what happened,
but I liked it.
I smoked weed ever since then,
until I stopped,
like I never imagined there would be a time in my life
where I didn't smoke weed.
When I got clean,
I still didn't have anything against weed,
I just, when I'm staying clean I didn't want anything.
I wanted to just try nothing.
I was really scared to try cannabis again
when I tried it,
because I was scared I'd wake up the monster.
Fortunately, I did but it went the positive way.
I woke up the monster
and became obsessed on helping people with it,
rather than waking up the monster
and becoming a crack head with it, right?
- Pretty sure I was smoking weed in a schoolyard,
out of an apple.
The old apple pipe with a couple of friends.
And I remember feeling like oh shit,
my grandma's totally gonna know I'm high.
And I was about 13.
- You know,
you know what, I remember smoking weed when I was a kid.
I said, you know what, this might not be so bad.
But then the dosage you had to take.
Then it got bad.
Like I never hallucinated or anything like that,
but boy I'll tell you.
I would take it before I went to bed,
and then,
I'd fall asleep.
But I would got so high, that it would wake me up.
And I worried about things I did in the third grade.
- When I used cannabis the first time in 15 years,
it was 100% medical.
It was not recreational at all.
It was only after about nine months
of using cannabis that I started
enjoying it like that.
I don't want to say 'non-medical',
I believe that all cannabis use is medical.
But sometimes that medical benefit is just relaxing me.
(soft piano music)
I lot of the people I helped,
they're not cannabis people at all.
A lot of the people I help
are either people in recovery,
people in recovery's parents,
people in recovery's family members,
and people come to me because they know
that I can address their concerns with using cannabis.
They know that they can trust me to tell the truth,
even if it's not what they want to here.
I'm blessed with the ability to connect with people.
Like I don't know how, but like I'm lucky.
When I meet someone and they're sick,
and I talk to 'em, nine out of 10 times
I feel like they hear me.
And if they hear me, then we got a chance.
I have a four-part plan really,
and it's not that hard.
It's only one part cannabis.
And if you change a few things in your life,
you got a chance.
- The plan Pete had for me was,
like he said, the four-part plan.
I cut out the sugar, soda, I was an avid soda drinker,
so that was really rough giving soda up,
but I followed the diet to a T.
I did,
the first part of it,
I did 12 drops of the oil a day,
and then when the tumors came back, I called him,
I said, what'll I do?
I need something, and he's like okay,
"we're gonna increase you to 18."
So I was doing 18 drops a day.
After a while you get used to it,
but it takes,
especially for someone who's never done it before,
it takes a long time.
And the diet, did like vegan,
for the first four months I was vegan,
and then I did vegetarian for probably about a year,
and then I slowly started adding
like organic meats, and organic vegetables,
and all that back in.
- Some people can't take the oil,
it's just too much, right?
They get too anxious, they do all these things,
and sometimes in order for me,
if I have a patient like that, and they're open to it,
sometimes I suggest suppositories,
because with the suppository,
you could do twice a day,
do a half a gram in a suppository.
Other than that, I don't think dabbing is gonna cure cancer.
I don't think smoking flower is gonna cure cancer.
I think ingesting oil is probably
one of two ways to cure cancer with cannabis.
I want someone to take at least a thousand milligrams a day,
for 90 days, at least.
Now, I have some patients that have used
higher doses of
a tincture that I've made with CBD, and THC-A,
which will get them to where they don't
have the anxiousness.
It's a little lighter load.
But I'm a proponent of the high dose,
I definitely believe in the high dose.
At least a thousand milligrams a day for cancer.
(somber piano music)
If it's brain cancer,
or certain types of estrogen-based breast cancer,
it's been shown that a two-to-one ratio, higher CBD,
to THC, is the answer.
But in my experience, every other cancer,
is better the exact opposite of that.
Like more THC and some CBD.
I've learned that through helping people along the way.
Sugar is cancer food.
You gotta get rid of sugar.
Sugar, if you don't get rid of it,
it's gonna feed your cancer.
So that's the first thing you've gotta get rid of,
is get rid of sugar.
I say carbs.
I say get rid of the carbs,
for at least three to six months.
You can still have a little.
I have patients that'll still cheat,
and still mess around and do a little but,
it's hard to be perfect,
especially if you think you're dying.
You're like, why should I eat like crap like I hate,
if I'm dying anyways, shouldn't I just eat what I want?
But then, if you eat right,
you've got a better chance.
Alkalinity,
you have to be cognizant of your alkalinity.
I usually tell people
to buy the alkaline diet cookbook,
and read it from front to back,
and what that'll do is it'll explain
what foods metabolize more alkaline.
100% of cancer patients, they're too acidic.
So alkalinity will help.
There's some people that are anti-that, right?
But I still direct people towards it.
If you eat alkaline,
you're basically eating veggies anyways,
so that's what I'd rather them eat.
The next step is 100% of cancer patients
are nutrient-deficient.
So I always tell 'em to get a juicer.
And if you just juice once a day at least,
a good healthy green juice,
you're gonna be better off nutrient wise
than if you don't.
So it's only gonna help.
In some cases, I tell 'em,
when you can't get anything,
you should go all the way vegan.
Almost every time, food is the cause
of most peoples' problems.
I kind of believe that eating foods
without nutritional value for a long period of time,
cancer will develop in anyone.
The way to fix that is to eat
foods with nutritional value,
and get your system running again.
- So I was raised by my maternal grandma.
We call her Grambo Ronnie.
She was like five foot two,
real poofy hair.
Just picture her like perfectly coordinated,
like impeccable outfits,
but like a little old lady
that could chuck a log across the yard.
Like that was Grambo.
Grambo raised a bunch of kids that turned to hard drugs,
and Grambo always considered weed
the gateway that took them down that path,
so Grambo would find my weed, find my bong,
find my pipes,
dump it in the trash, break the pipes,
leave it out like on the table for me so I'd see it,
break my heart.
My grandma got diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
As a female non-smoker it was caught late
and it spread fast.
They told her that she had six weeks to live,
and she managed to last for six months.
And in that time I became her caretaker.
I learned how to like apply for all these programs
and get her medication, and she tried Marinol,
which was the synthetic-THC only form of medicine
that was available to cancer patients.
Back then this was like in 2004?
And my grandma was a Jehovah's Witness,
so she was a real religious lady,
and didn't like people who liked getting high.
She thought it was bad.
And she always took my weed and did bad things with it,
so when I suggested that she take the Marinol,
she was scared, but because her doctor told her
that it might help her with stuff, she did.
And she didn't like it.
So I ended up making her some weed butter,
and I made her some buttery noodles
and that was the first meal that I watched her eat
that was a whole meal, in six months.
And she was able to sleep shortly after that, peacefully,
and the whole bowl of noodles was gone,
so that was a win in my book.
I didn't tell my aunt though.
I was afraid that my Aunt Lynn was gonna find out,
because that would have been like
more family drama.
But the next morning my grandma woke up,
and she was like crying,
and I was like, what's going on?
Are you hurt, in pain?
And she's like, no.
She's like, I'm sorry I threw away your weed.
But she used to call it pot.
She used to call it all the old-lady words for weed.
But in the end, I realized that
if I could my grandma to accept cannabis as medicine,
then there's a way to convert
even the most staunch prohibitionist.
Like it's really like, it's worth it to try.
Even if you just leave like little information here,
a little article there,
give grandma the green.
They'll like it.
- THC is the secret for most cancer,
it's not CBD.
My job, when I'm helping someone,
is to get their CB1 and their CB2 receptors
firing at maximum.
And if you don't know what that is,
everything with a spine
has an endocannabinoid system,
and it's tied to your nervous system.
And at the end of this system is receptors,
and these CB1 and CB2 receptors
are perfectly designed for cannabis,
like they're made for it.
- The endocannabinoid system is our body's response
to both cannabis, the plant,
as well as our endogenous,
or the parts or the chemicals in our bodies
that actually respond to and react to
all the different things that are going on in our bodies.
So, let me simplify.
The endocannabinoid system works to accept
outside plant material,
as well as to react to our inside body's chemicals
called the endocannabinoids,
as opposed to the outside chemicals,
which are the phytocannabinoids.
What we think of with the endocannabinoid system,
is more of a return back to normal,
or a return back to baseline.
And that's why we're seeing a lot of people
not understanding all things cannabis because they say,
well how does this energize me,
but also make me more calm?
How does this give me less anxiety,
but also make me feel like
I want to get up and move in the day.
Because a lot of those things
are very conflicting for patients.
And what we find is the endocannabinoid system
tends to re-regulate our brain back to the middle,
so for patients who have anxiety,
or they feel like their system is stressed out and up,
I find that endocannabinoids, as well as phytocannabinoids,
the part of the plant, bring patients back to the middle,
or bring them back to a calm.
For patients who are already naturally calm,
and don't have anxiety,
it can help with things like pain,
where we don't again, make people sleepy,
or make people tired,
which is a very common side effect
of other types of pharmaceutical medications.
There was a really interesting article
that came out in the past year.
This woman went to the hospital,
and had a surgery on her wrist,
and the wrist surgery she had done is notoriously painful,
it really, really hurts,
especially the day after surgery,
once the anesthesia wears off.
She ended up leaving the hospital with zero narcotics,
and this is unheard of in this particular type of surgery.
So the doctors all scratched their heads, and said,
there's something different, let's figure this out.
They went through a battery of genetic testing,
and what they found was, this woman
was naturally missing the enzyme
that breaks down her endocannabinoids.
And this specific gene,
that naturally breaks down her endocannabinoids,
caused her to have a huge surge
of endocannabinoids in her system.
And what did that do?
So what do these endocannabinoids
do naturally in your system?
One of those things was she had
very little history of anxiety,
just overall across her,
I think she was 60 or 70 years old,
across her lifetime had very little anxiety.
She had very little pain overall.
So she naturally had fallen,
and gotten bruises or cuts or problems over the years,
and none of those times did she need
extra-strength or strong painkillers.
She at no point needed narcotics.
The other thing they did notice as well,
was that her memory was not so great.
So one of the things that we talk about
in terms of, specifically with THC, is memory.
We do see short-term memory loss
in patients who use THC chronically,
and sometimes even with patients who are using
large amounts, but for short time periods,
so what we think of as recreational usage.
You do see memory changes in those patients.
And likewise, we saw this in this woman
who had her natural endocannabinoids, at a higher level,
which was pretty remarkable.
- When you keep those receptors firing,
the patient has a chance to get to homeostasis,
you can get to where your body operating at an optimum,
given what condition you're in.
It was probably the internet.
And being at the time,
I was like a long-time member of NA.
I was an active member in recovery,
that would talk about recovery on social media,
and talk about that stuff and then,
every now and then I'd be talking about cannabis.
And then, people would be like,
what the hell is he talking about?
Like he's not a weed guy, he's a total NA guy.
And then a couple of people would engage me,
and then I found one.
And I found one and I just came down and gave him oil.
I gave him oil, nine months later he's
remission.
My first remission phone call changed my life.
I'll never turn back.
The feeling you get when you get a call,
and someone that was dying,
is like, I'm okay now, thank you.
That's heavy.
There's no way to describe it in words.
Like I can't even tell you.
And just the day before we came down here for this,
I got the call from my 61st remission,
and it was my first international remission.
I gave a guy meds for his mom,
and he got 'em to her out of the country,
and we discovered that she's in remission.
And it was my first one.
There's a lot of obstacles.
In 2014 I tried to grow,
I grew for a year,
and I found that I'm not that great of a grower.
Again, the money guys always seem to be the problem.
Everyone always wants to come in and try to help,
but then they always just want to try to profit from it.
And, you can't.
There's no way.
I don't know every many cancer patients with money, do you?
Most cancer patients already spent all their money
trying to get out of their problem,
and usually get to cannabis as the last resort.
I get people that are like ready to go to hospice.
They already signed their house away to their kids
and stuff sometimes.
And they don't have money.
If they do, I'll get like maybe a $100 donation
for $800 worth of medicine or something.
I never blink, I never blink,
because any penny is a blessing
and it'll all work out, and it always has.
Like I said, I've never told one no.
When you say resistant,
I would say, uninformed.
And if you lead people to the information,
for them to absorb it, and figure it out,
and even if they start slow.
Sometimes if you start slow,
then it gets easier anyways.
Especially if you have regular cancer,
and you're not used to cannabis at all,
you have to start slow.
It's too powerful.
It'll knock you down.
I've had people hallucinate,
I've had people tell me like, I lost 18 hours,
or different things.
There's so many things that happen.
And that's with like half of a drop.
And I'm telling them,
we need to get to 12 drops a day, right?
And it's not easy.
I've had patients that would set up the alarm
to get up at four in the morning to take a couple drops,
because they need to be able to get through the day,
and maybe if I take 'em in the middle of the night,
I could get through, they're spacing it out
through the day a little better.
This is really hard.
I have California Botanicals Direct,
which it was a collective in California for years,
and that's where I met the guy who introduced me to this.
I took highest CBD at a Secret Cup,
and that opened a lot of doors for me
within the cannabis community,
because remember I was not really
in cannabis before that for a long time.
I was in NA.
So winning that cup really helped open the door
to the community for me.
And once that happened,
it all just kind of took off.
So now, as of January 9th,
they took away the collective defense,
and they outlawed me giving away medicine.
They made it to where if I give someone medicine,
that I owe the retail value of the tax
for that medicine, for medicine I give away free.
So what I did is,
I had a few choices.
I could either give away all my recipes
to some profiteer guy,
to run with it and make millions,
or walk away, or start something myself.
And what I chose to do is incorporate
California Botanicals Direct, as a hemp conduit,
for legal hemp products,
and try to make that into something
beautiful, that's where I'm at right now.
That's the stages I'm at.
And it's going really well,
I've got me first round of money,
and the website's about to go active.
I got the banking, I got everything I need,
so it's kind of moving fast right now,
and it's kind of scary,
but I'm pretty confident with where I'm going,
and I hope everything works out.
(soft piano music)
It makes you feel good,
and what it does is it relieves your anxiety,
and it relieves pain.
I've seen it work for so many people
for so many things, I don't even,
I don't want to put it in a box,
because it helps everybody, it's crazy.
Sometimes, like we were talking about food, right?
And if sugar is cancer food,
and I tell you that you need to stop eating sugar,
and we set it up for you to not eat sugar,
and you still do, then sometimes they don't make it.
I had a patient in Oregon,
he is in a house with all vegan food.
He was in there, and he was in a position to do it.
I gave the medicine, they had the food,
they had specific instructions,
and the guy would get up in the middle of the night
and walk two miles to the gas station
and buy chocolate milk and donuts
and then come back,
like he couldn't not,
and he's one of the ones that didn't make it.
And then, I have others ones that fought,
even though,
I have one that he's lost over a hundred pounds,
since the sugar is cancer food.
And it's like,
he's another miracle.
If you take it serious,
then miracles happen.
I've seen it over and over, like I say,
61 as of yesterday.
- Another big perspective you're gonna see online,
and you're gonna see around and about,
and there's some research coming through about is
cannabis for the cure, so to speak.
Can we use this term, first of all?
No, we cannot, it is not appropriate just yet.
It's not responsible as a clinician, as a doctor,
it's not responsible to use those words.
What I can say is that we're seeing people
get through chemo treatments better.
We're seeing people get through radiation better.
We're seeing them not struggle as much.
We're starting to see on a molecular level,
and on rat levels, that they're doing research to evaluate,
how individual parts of cannabis,
so be it CBD, be it THC, be it THC-A,
be it CBD-A, be it CBG, CBN,
and we can do the little dance of the alphabet soup here,
but we won't, because what ends up happening is,
is there's so much we have to look into,
and to simplify it, to just calling it cannabis,
is doing both the plant a disservice,
as well as our patients with cancer a disservice.
So we really need to get to the bottom of all this,
and part of this is to encourage your state,
encourage the federal government,
encourage everyone to allow for this type of research.
Because what we are seeing is that those patients
who do use this, again here in California,
it's been legal medically for cancer patients for 23 years,
and those patients overall fare better,
whether it's lasting longer,
whether it's a complete cure
in conjunction with chemo and radiation and surgery,
if that's appropriate for the individual,
or be it that they're just getting
better quality of life throughout their cancer treatment,
we are seeing benefits.
And to undo that, or to not discuss that with patients,
would be doing everyone a big harm.
- I don't want to make any claims about anything.
I would say, try it.
Try it, and get your receptors firing,
especially if you've never done it,
especially if you've never tried it.
If you're older and you got aches and pains,
and you've never tried it,
start there.
- It's been two years, and I've been cancer-free,
and they just recently reconstructed the whole
half of my face.
So, I still don't have nerve function or anything,
but I'm pretty now.
- I mean there's 61 people that say that
I helped them get to remission.
And some I was more involved with than others.
Some I wasn't able to give medicine,
but I gave all the information for them
to get exactly what they need
to do the regimen I told them.
And I count those ones too.
- Pete is an exceptional individual.
He has, I don't know if he learned it from somewhere,
of if it's just who he is,
like a wonderful bedside manner,
and he just knows how to talk to people, in general,
and he also knows how to talk to people who are sick.
I think that's something that's really hard to find.
Most doctors do not have that.
I think Pete should teach a class,
and teach them, like this is how you listen to people.
- I would like to say that with the way
that the market is going,
find a reliable source
of good medicine.
You need to find a good source,
because there's a lot of people that don't care,
and they don't care how they make it.
They don't care what they put in it.
- I would like them to know
that they don't have to feel bad for feeling better.
When I worked at the collective,
80% of the time I would spend with people on the phone,
was encouraging them to take control of their own health,
and to stop feeling bad for feeling better.
People have this notion that,
enjoying the high, or enjoying the THC
and the effects that it has,
makes them a bad person.
And that kills me, because that are in so much pain,
and they're being encouraged to take such horrible medicine,
with such bad side effects,
they still are being made to feel bad for feeling better.
You know, feel better, take the medicine.
Just try it, because you have nothing to lose,
and what's the worst that can happen?
You're gonna end up laughing for a few more minutes
instead of puking your guts out,
or not being able to go to the bathroom for a few days.
- My original dream status was to open
a cannabis healing center,
to find a retirement home that's going out of business,
and find a way to buy it,
and make it a world-class cannabis healing center.
It could also be a detox center,
and a spa, and a lot of things.
That would be dream status,
to have a giant healing center.
I don't want to say like hospice,
because I'd like to say the exact opposite,
the way out of hospice,
a way to not have to go to hospice.
But not all of them are ever gonna make it,
but to make it good enough for them,
on the way out.
Some of those places suck.
Have you ever been to a hospice?
It's horrible man.
I'm a lucky guy, man.
(solemn piano music)
Now, they've changed the laws in California,
so I opened California Botanicals Direct.
What I'm doing is I may,
I have 13 products now, that I'm putting out,
and making available and shipping nationwide,
within the next, way before this is out,
I'll be shipping nationwide.
Like I say, try to find a trusted resource of good medicine.
I'm in this film,
because I am a trusted resource within my community.
People refer people to me.
In the cannabis community,
I'm the one that like people say,
oh you have someone that's sick, call Pete.
Call CDBP, go do that.
I don't even know how that happened.
I helped a couple, and then people saw that,
and it's just grown and,
like I say I'm fortunate.
It's never hurt to give away oil.
If it doesn't hurt, why not help?
- You know I really appreciate Pete for what he's done.
In his interview you can tell,
he has a servant's heart.
The man really has love for people,
and I just feel blessed that I was able to meet Pete.
And like he said, the money got tough,
because people, they do go through their money
trying to get well.
Like I said, it worked for me.
- This woman, had cancer,
and she was looking on the web,
and she found Skunk Farm,
and she interacted with Gray Wolf, and Carla,
and they gave her medicine,
and she let her doctor know, she was gonna try cannabis.
And her doctor let her insurance company know,
and her insurance company called her the next day,
and said if you test positive for THC,
we will not pay for your chemo.
So she didn't take it,
and she went through nine months of chemo,
until she got to the point where they're like,
you know there's nothing we can do.
Get your affairs in order.
You're not gonna make it.
And she remembered that oil that she had gotten.
And she started taking it,
and 90 days later she was in remission.
And she looked me in the eye and told me that story,
and it changed my life, actually.
I didn't believe it was true.
What I knew is, if it was,
I could save some lives.
And I have.
(solemn piano music)