Don't Get High….. Get Well

I am appearing as an expert witness and physician for two of my patients over the next two weeks. I have been to 34 hearings or trials and am happy to say I have never and will never charge for this service. I would love to be able to charge, but in this field, any received money shows guilt to something. Anyway, these patients are broke by the time I see them.  For these patients, much of the issue was the numerous tincture bottles they had in their possession. They were working with legal collectives and had all proper legal documentation. Much of the issue in the end is that the state and county seem to believe that a tincture is a concentrate – such as hash. Below is pretty much what I wrote to the courts:

One of the most troubling and silly reasons for jail or potential prison time, has been the possession of bottles of tincture. Of course it is never one or two bottles. It is generally someone legally delivering bottles of tincture to collectives; hey, there are flowers and tinctures in every collective store….they get there somehow and

A cannabis tincture is not a concentrate; it is a dilution of the cannabis plant medicine. It is a dilution of the THC, CBD or any of the other 448 molecules in the plant.

A concentrate is defined in chemistry as a solution or solid “material” that was     altered in some manner to make the amount of the “material” per weight, such as in mg/cc altered from a lower value to a higher value. For example, if one begins with a lemonade solution that contains 10 mg of sugar in every cc of water and the water in the lemonade is allowed to evaporate, a concentrate of lemonade is produced. If more water is added, it is diluted. A single lemon can make one glass or several glasses of lemonade depending upon how concentrated or dilute the lemonade is intended to be. A single lemon can therefore make much more than it’s weight in lemonade, as sugar and water make up the bulk of the weight.

If we apply this same logic to the situation in the cannabis plant, the starting “material” is the actual cannabis plant with an average of 10% THC by weight. One tenth of a gram of cannabis is 100 mg. (one gram = 1000 mg and 10% or one tenth of this is 100 mg). If this extraction into a liquid is even 50% efficient, a total of 50 mg of THC can be extracted into the tincture from the single gram of cannabis plant material. Alchemy’s tincture averaged 1 mg of THC for every cc of tincture. Each bottle has 10 cc’s. So, each bottle averaged approximately 10 mg of THC.

This means that one gram of 10% THC plant will make 5 bottles of tincture at the dilution used by Alchemy Collective.

Another way to view this is that each gram of cannabis makes 5 bottles, so a pound of cannabis, 454 grams, would make over 4000 bottles. If it took pounds and pounds to make 100 or 200 bottles of tincture, each bottle would be prohibitively expensive and useless.

In addition, butane or other toxic chemicals are not used in the creation of tinctures as they are only used in the making of the true “concentrates” or hash or cannabis oils.