Virginia’s Cannabis Control Authority recently announced a new accredited physician training program for providers who want to better advise their patients on the safe use of cannabis related products. But how are those products made? WMRA’s Sara Prince toured a state-regulated dispensary to find out, and filed this report.
TRENT WOLOVEK: So just heel in first, then pull back really fast.
That’s Trent Wolovek, CEO of Jushi Holdings, which owns and operates several Virginia dispensaries. This one, in Manassas, is currently one of the two closest to the WMRA listening region. Trent is walking me through the “cultivation corridor,” which is the hallway at the heart of the operation. Each room shows a stage in the plant’s four-to-five-month life cycle.
WOLOVEK: And so, we start with what are called mothers. We’ll take clones and we'll propagate all those clones. That allows us to have what's called a perpetual harvest.
Plants bask in warm, light filled rooms with hundreds of fans providing ventilation.
WOLOVEK: We don't want hot spots in the room. That leads to yeast, mold, mildew. We don't want any of that. So these are getting 18 hours of light, six off.
Next up is the vegetation room where the focus is on developing the trichomes which house the feel-good medicinals of the plant - the cannabinoids and terpenes.
WOLOVEK: Terpenes are very, very, very finicky. They're not stable, like cannabinoids. And so, like anything goes wrong, those are like the first thing to go. … After about three to four weeks in there, we’ll move to what's called a flowering room.
The flowering room is cooler and less humid, with rows of plants lit from floor to near ceiling 12 hours a day for two months, which encourages the plant to start producing the flower with consistent results.
WOLOVEK: And good luck trying to do that outdoors. It ain’t ever raining in here, it ain’t ever windy in here. Like, if we have stress, it changes body chemistry and it’s why we’re such believers in indoor cultivation.
As maturity nears, the trichomes start to show color. That’s when they are flushed with water, pushing them to become more aromatic in an effort to survive. Ironically, that’s when they’re cut down and moved into the drying and curing room.
SARA PRINCE: Is the temperature usually this cold?
WOLOVEK: Yes. We want minimal degradation of the terpenes and the cannabinoids.
Drying and curing preserves the plant’s terpenes —those lemony, orangey, piney aromas responsible for anti-inflammatory effects, pain relief, and enhanced chemotherapy benefits. The plants are auto-cured for about a week inside industrial-sized vaults with heavy locked doors and temperature and humidity monitors that track conditions inside.
WOLOVEK: We’ve got to make sure all that moisture gets… burped… is what we call it out of the room correctly, so you don't do it too fast, or do it too slow.
The plants are hung upside down and then placed in bins. Leaving moisture in can lead to mold growth, making the cannabis less medicinally useful. Next comes extraction and refinement to separate cannabinoids and terpenes from the plant. One technique is hydrocarbon extraction, where the buds are washed with a solvent that pulls out the plant’s active compounds, turns them into an oil, which is then gently heated into a gas.
WOLOVEK: We will take the gas that are in those canisters, put so much pressure and heat that it will liquefy and we will end up with what's called a slurry.
That slurry then has to be refined to get out all the cannabinoids.
WOLOVEK: So we'll introduce ethanol. And we'll run it through the refiner a couple times, and then we'll take that mix and put it into this hot bath. And what it will do is burn off the ethanol. It'll go up this tube and hit those cold coils and condense back into a liquid and then you're left with the cannabinoid oil. We'll bring it over to the short path distillation machine, and we'll be able to separate out different terpenes left or different cannabinoids.
PRINCE: This looks like a Thomas Edison experiment.
WOLOVEK: Yeah yeah, exactly.
Solventless methods are also used. The rest is just cooked, baked, and batched in “the kitchen,” which is more like a massive room with about 20 worktables, overhead fans, and stainless steel refrigerators, piping, and industrial scale containers.
WOLOVEK: So we do vape pens here, we have a chocolate machine over there. We have a gummy cooker right here.
Once finished, products move to the dispensary, where medical patients pick up their orders.
WOLOVEK: So this is our sales floor. So if they want to talk to a pharmacist, they're able to do so. Or they can just go ahead and order off an iPad.
A handful of people sit at cubicles, scrolling through products as we head to the back.
WOLOVEK: This is our finished vault. This is where they pick and pack everything.
It looks much like a traditional pharmacy—bins of wrapped packages, each with dosing information. Today’s on-site pharmacist, John Ielli, says the most common conditions he sees are post-surgical pain, cancer, and arthritis.
PRINCE: Do you have any interaction with the prescribing physicians?
JOHN IELLI: We have interactions with the patient. We go over their medications list also, and look at all the interactions and everything with the medications that they're taking.
While there aren’t currently preemptive consultations with recommending physicians, this is an area that will expand in the future, now that the state’s Cannabis Control Authority has launched a new cannabis education program for physicians as of December 1.
WOLOVEK: So, yeah. That’s it.
The tour of one regulated Virginia cannabis dispensary is now complete. Next time, we’ll take a look at what goes into the processing of legal hemp and its various uses.
