The team I was starting the company with was a family of two pharmacists and an E.R. I knew how to make pharmaceutical drugs, I understood the process, and the idea of cannabis as medicine seemed interesting to me. How was your experience suited to the industry? Up to that time and further, I hadn’t consumed cannabis.ĭeMeo pours the filtered micella into a barrel for solvent recovery. It started with writing applications for licenses and transitioned to learning cannabis TEK (Technical Empirical Knowledge). I took some notes, and that’s how I entered the industry. I literally told him, ‘I will come and shovel shit for you if you need me to do something.’ Within a few weeks, he told me I needed to sit in on a city meeting. One individual, Duke Fu, a close friend now, mentioned he was starting a marijuana business here in Las Vegas. While I was at Cardinal, I was fortunate enough to make friends with people there. How did you get into the cannabis industry? I did that for a few years, and then I switched to a more focused role there doing quality assurance and analytics. When I made that switch, I started manufacturing intravenous pharmaceutical drugs for myocardial scans and imaging cancer. Within six months, I moved to a position as a Nuclear PET Technician, positron emission tomography. I ended up getting a job at Cardinal Health. Besides that, I was distracted at the time. It was a dream of mine, but as I got older, I had a girlfriend and realized I needed to make some money. My original intent was actually to go pre-med, continuing my education to become a surgeon. I went to school in Nevada, first to the College of Southern Nevada, then UNLV. This is what motivates me to push harder and continue my learning.ĭeMeo conducts an ethanol extraction at GT Nevada lab by pouring Micella through a Hochstrom filter and 5um filter paper. I don’t think cannabis is a miracle, but these personal experiences showed me the power of cannabis as medicine. We decided to give him little pea-sized drops of distillate every few hours for about two months, which stimulated his appetite and helped him sleep. ![]() We had read stories about cannabis saving people who had cancer but were skeptical. Then my father-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and lost about 150 pounds within a very short period of time. Her neurologist even said to continue consuming cannabis alongside her pharmaceutical meds. Cannabis was helping her stay calm and work through her epilepsy. On a more personal level, my wife was diagnosed with adolescent myoclonic epilepsy and had semi-frequent seizures. When the opportunity for me to enter the legal cannabis industry came up, a motivating factor was that I want to take the power of this thing away from bad actors - this thing that I see as positive. I realized part of this was not intrinsically bad, but it brought in bad actors. But I also ended up seeing the bad side, people getting taken advantage of, getting hurt over small-level deals. The traditional way of thinking about it, that it was this horrible gateway drug, wasn’t true from what I saw. I realized a lot of my family members used cannabis, and they were really successful business owners and entrepreneurs, some of them worth millions of dollars, and smoked it all the time. What did you come to understand about cannabis as you matured? As I grew up and became a teenager, I realized cannabis was a drug. They never hid it from me, it was completely normal. My parents used it all the time, even my grandparents smoked cannabis. It has been a part of my life since I was really young. Nobody was a bad guy, though we did have bad experiences. ![]() I would hang out with their kids at home or out in the world while my dad did business. ![]() I interacted with these people as a kid while my dad had to work. He was pretty well-liked here in Las Vegas. He had a good connection with what I presume was the Mexican cartel. OU: Tell us about your background in cannabis.ĪD: My dad was heavily involved in the black market, and so growing up, I had always seen these things happening around me with cannabis. Here, Anthony talks with OU about his background in cannabis and his vision for its future. As a “master alchemist” and co-chair of Commercial Extraction and Manufacturing at Oaksterdam University, Anthony DeMeo isolates prized components of cannabis in the lab and teaches others his time-tested techniques.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |