Going to Market: Med-X, Inc. | Part 1
Jason Sander:
“Let’s talk a little bit more about the medical side. Give us a little background on your partner, Dr. Toomey, and whoever else might have helped work on that.”
Matthew Mills:
“Dr. Toomey specializes in elderly and hospice patients, something like 3000 of them over the past 23 years. So, it goes without saying that he’s a busy man. He also has worked with several large pharmaceutical companies as a clinical investigator. I don’t want to name names because that would be unethical. His track record is amazing. As a pain management specialist, he has developed several different products for some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies out there. So while those companies obviously have their place, he was interested in helping me develop all natural cannabis pain relief products.
Next to Dr. Toomey, we also have two other physicians on our board of directors. One is a neurologist out of Las Vegas, his name is Dr. Morton Hyson and he is a top-notch guy in his field. He’s also been on the cutting edge of developing products. He and I have actually developed a headache product for one of our other companies that’s now circling into the pharmaceutical world. It’s a 100% natural product, very unique, unlike anything else that’s out there.
And then we have a gentleman by the name of Dr. Allan Kurtz, who also is a specialist and general practitioner that deals with a lot of pain management. So we have an incredible group of physicians that have come together on this. And just to reiterate – not one of us takes any money from Med-X, Inc. This is a stock play for us, as we recognize what we have here. These guys are on the cutting edge and are an incredible group to work with, especially on pain management.
So in addition to our world-class team and board, we have positioned ourselves well with a top-notch group of medical professionals who also have long track records in their fields.
Jason:
Let’s talk about hospice patients. While we know that cannabis can be a really good pain management medicine, again, there’s still the stigma attached to that. We think hospice patients, and obviously all patients in general, should be able to legally use cannabis medically. What exactly are you and your team doing to help patients overcome obstacles?
Matt:
“Of course. There are a couple of stories here that we can discuss. Currently there are a couple of different high CBD strains out there. One is called Charlotte’s Web, which is exclusively in Colorado. And, another one here in California that we’ve been playing with called Harlequin. Harlequin is a 5:2 ratio, CBD being the five and two being the THC ratio of this plant. So, it’s got a lower THC ratio that most strains that are out there, like we talked about before. And we are cultivating this right now and we’ll be testing it on various patients that we have with our cooperative. We do have a cooperative in place that allows us to cultivate legally here in the State of California within the city limits, and we are bringing patients into this cooperative just for testing reasons.
We don’t sell our products or donate our products. Everything must stay in-house. It’s 100% for research and because we are able to cultivate the way we do, it gives us the ability to start testing these pain management concepts. We do have several patients that are involved, obviously their names stay concealed, but we do have several patients that are suffering and we believe that the Harlequin strain is the jumping off point to continue to help relieve some of that. The patients are pleased they’re getting their ailments relieved while ingesting less morphine and ingesting less prescription drugs for the pain and the sleep side of things. They are able to do this because we have made it available to them.
We are currently in the process of bringing in the machinery that allows us to start extracting the CBD and THC oils, and separating the THC from the CBD oils to really start bringing this into play. We recognize what needs to be done and this machinery is about $100,000 dollars. We have already built our research facility again on a piece of property that I own. It’s a 600-square foot laboratory that also doubles as a cultivation center and has a small cultivation going on in it right now.
The laboratory enables us to cultivate and extract these essential CBD oils. We use the language “essential oils” because of our previous product background. The goal is to research and develop products from an endless supply of CBD oil.
So right now, we are focusing on which strains are going to give us the most positive results. We have cultivated several strains: Blue Dream, Headband, and Bubba Kush, and we obviously already talked about Harlequin. We believe that we will be able to supply a very good pain-relief product, a very good stress-relief product and that’s our initial steps to extracting the CBD oils from the cannabis plant and we’re going to be a company that will be able to do this for other cultivators. A lot of cultivators don’t want to step up and spend this kind of money. They have a tabletop type oil extraction machines, but we are going to step up and buy one that will really give us the ability, if we wanted to, service other cultivators and extract their CBD oils for them as well. So the services that we can bring to patients as well as other cultivators and other dispensary types that are supplying patients will be a big part of our model down the road.”
“Let’s shift gears here and talk a little bit more about the Nature-Cide product. Can you please give us some more background about what it is, what it does, what it costs, and why it’s better than the other products on the market?”
Matt:
“Absolutely. Nature-Cide has had about five years of development. It has been used for various things. The first thing that it was used for here in Los Angeles was pest control. We focused on pest control with fire departments in the L.A. areas that were having problems with various pests. One of the biggest pests was rattle snakes, which you probably don’t have to deal with as much out there on the East Coast. One of the fire stations we’ve worked with near here is the most called fire station in the country for rattlesnake problems. The station is located in the Santa Monica mountain range between Calabasas and Malibu. There are a lot of upscale homes there that put out rattlesnake calls all the time. The fire department basically goes in and kills the rattlesnake. So we wanted to try to take a more humane approach and prevent that from happening. We thought, there has to be a way to make the snakes not attracted to these properties?. And that’s where we come in with the product. We’ve got fire department liaisons that recommend that they call us, and we started the service four years ago for this particular issue.
Since then, we have developed and evolved a product that not only wards off rattlesnakes and rats, mice and other types of vermin, but we have developed a number of products that kill insects on contact. It works by interfering with their immune system and their respiratory system. It is effective on most bugs, including pests interfere with cultivation of cannabis. This includes spider mites, white flies, cockroaches, fleas, ticks, you name it. When the product touches them, it causes a chain reaction. These kinds of insects don’t have lungs like you and I. They breathe through their bodies, or what is called their exoskeletons.
What happens when this product hits them, it causes the spherical on their bodies to open up and allow the essential oil part of product to penetrate their exoskeleton, causing a neurological impairment to the bug. It kills them almost instantly. This is the science behind the product.
The premise behind the the snake and rodent product is a little different. It’s purpose is to is to manage pests not kill them. We later learned that many of the repellant qualities that work for the rattlesnake product also works as a repellant for bugs as well. They smell it, they don’t want to get near it, they hate the smell of it, and almost smells like ammonia would smell to you and I. As soon as a human smells ammonia, the first thing we tend to say is, ‘Oh God, got to get out of here and find some air fresh air.’ It does the same thing to rodents, reptiles and insects. So from this, the product evolved, and it sunk into the pest control industry.
From here, both products are moving nationally into pest control distribution and we are also moving into the hospitality venues. Because we took the time to register this product with the EPA on a national basis, as well as doing a full study behind the product, it was approved by the Colorado Agricultural Department, that this is a product that could be used in cultivation. So we now have a product that can be used daily, literally. If you got a problem with spider mites, this product can be used daily in a cultivation room or in a cultivation center; you can mop the floors with it, spray the plants with it if they are being hydroponically grown. In indoor grows, they can be sprayed directly on the plants when the lights are off and it will kill everything on the plant. And the beauty of it is you can do it every day until the bug is eradicated completely and then it just leaches out just like the nutrients leach out at the end of your growth cycle.
Whenever you are growing the nutrients used to bloom and get larger flowers and buds on the cannabis plants, you have to leach them out before you harvest. The same thing happens here. You just leach them out, the natural product leaches out just like the nutrients leach out of the product and you are left with something that’s clean and pure.
So the Nature-Cide product is very unique, 100% natural, safe to use every day, and because of that, cultivators all around the country are now buying the product, moving it into their cultivating experiments as a 100% natural pest control solution.
It’s a very inexpensive product, we sell it in a 1-gallon, 5-gallon and a 55-gallon drum form, it’s a 9 to 1 concentrate. For instance, a gallon of product costs, at wholesale for a cultivator, $99 dollars and that turns into ten gallons. Start doing the math on this stuff and you see, it’s actually pretty affordable, and to have organic cannabis, it’s okay to spend a little extra money because people will pay more money to have it. Not that we are promoting anything about selling marijuana but it’s going to come to that down the road and we’re going to be on the forefront of a product that’s going to be used. We truly believe that Nature-Cide will be a big part of the future for the cannabis cultivation industry.”
In part 3 of Going to Market: Med-X, Inc. Matthew will discuss the things cannabis entrepreneurs should consider when starting a company as well as where he sees Med-X, Inc. moving forward.
