Ep. 14 The Curious Case of Cannabis

What do you know about hemp and cannabis? Join Ty Greenough (Graduate Assistant for Substance Misuse) as he talks with two JMU professors, Dr. Daniel Downey, Professor of Environmental, Nuclear, & Analytical Chemistry, and Dr. Samuel Morton, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, about the nuances of the cannabis plant, the differences between hemp and marijuana, and what that means for farmers around the Shenandoah Valley. They will share about some of the research they are doing in partnership with the greater community and why that work is important to the future of the hemp industry.

A full transcript of this week's episode can be found here.

All episodes of Season 1 (2020 - 2021) were recorded  when The Office of Health Promotion or, The Well, was a part of the University Health Center and located in the Student Success Center. As of summer 2021, The Well no longer exists and we are now UREC Health Promotion. Check out Season 2 Episode 1 to learn more about these changes or visit JMU University Recreation's website.

Transcript

Episode 14 Transcript 

0:01 Jordan: Hey there! Welcome to Well Dukes, brought to you by the Well. Each week, you’ll hear conversations from a variety of JMU staff and students that we hope challenges what you know, think, or do in regard to your own health and helps you be Well Dukes.

0:22 Ty: Hey Dukes! Welcome to another episode of the Well Dukes podcast. My name is Ty Greenough and I am a graduate assistant for the Alcohol and Other Drug department here at the Well. Today, we’re going to be picking the brain of two of JMU’s finest to learn a little bit about a plant called cannabis. Welcome, gentlemen. Would you guys like to introduce yourselves?

0:40 Dr. Morton: Hello, my name is Samuel Morton and I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering and I am the, I guess, the lead researcher for the James Madison Industrial Hemp research program here.

0:54 Dr. Downey: Hi, my name is Dan Downey, Professor of Chemistry. I’ve been at JMU for 35 years. I’m also a former Duke (student). I was a student back in the 1970s, graduated from here. So I have a long history of association with JMU and Madison College back in the 70s. So I came back here to teach 35 years ago in the Department of Chemistry and I’m an analytical/environmental chemist and I’ve been working with hemp for about two years now.

1:24 Ty: Awesome. So you both have been involved here at JMU with a project, just, kind of surrounding hemp.

1:31 Dr. Downey: Yes, projects. That’s correct.

1:33 Ty: Yeah, plural. So lots of things going on now. Could you say a little bit about what sorts of research you guys have been doing?

1:41 Dr. Morton: Yes, um, in 2015, Mike Renfroe approached me about a collaborative project looking at growing industrial hemp in the Shenandoah Valley, with a focus on commercial conventional farming practices.  This was in response to the 2014 Farm Bill changes that allowed for state sponsored, university-driven research programs in the area of industrial hemp to be allowed to occur and to move forward. There were three universities in the first year: James Madison, Virginia Tech, and Virginia State University. There are four now with the addition of the University of Virginia. But we set out, to begin with, to support agricultural interest. There were a number of farmers in the Valley, one in particular, Glenn Rhodes, who had an interest in adding or potentially adding industrial hemp as a rotational crop. And so, we realized that we’ve largely forgotten much of the at-scale conventional farming practices, and so we needed to go back and kind of relearn and re-practice those. And so, for the first four or so years of our program, we expanded all over Virginia, in our case, our pinnacle year of 2018. We had the largest industrial hemp research program in the state, with about sixty acres in cultivation and about eleven partners broadly throughout the state. Looking predominantly at fiber and seed hemp that has the... I guess, the state’s interest in hemp has changed since that period of time and our program has kind of scaled back down to something much more closely focused to the Valley.

3:28 Dr. Downey: I came on at a later date, obviously, than Sam and Mike. Two years ago, a little bit less than two years ago, I was doing an environmental project on a turkey farm in Augusta County. And they told me that they were going to convert their agricultural production from raising turkeys to raising hemp. And I had zero knowledge at the time about hemp, and could have cared less, but I found it interesting when they started talking about the challenges that they were facing in raising hemp, and that… Cannabis sativa, that’s the same plant that is, as people know as marijuana. But the variant of industrial hemp doesn’t produce much of a compound called THC and it produces a lot more of a compound called CBD (cannabidiol). And that was the main reason that they wanted to switch over to this because people are using CBD for a variety of physical ailments and they wanted to raise this material, and hopefully profit from it. But they had analytical challenges because you can’t look at a cannabis plant and tell whether it’s high or low in THC or CBD either one, they have to do laboratory analyses on it. And I knew that we had a very good laboratory here on the campus of JMU that we could throw into this, and so I put students on the project and we started learning how to do cannabis analysis and have spent the last year and a half doing quite a few support services for various local farmers that are trying to raise CBD hemp.

5:02 Ty: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s been this interest in Shenandoah recently, just surrounding hemp; whether that be for fiber or for seed or for CBD. And you both sort of found your way through various avenues to the same field.

5:18 Dr. Downey: Yeah, it’s an exciting new field and, basically, the plant that we call industrial hemp was illegal until 2016 thereabouts and then it would be legalized. And it’s come from there. And so a new agricultural crop which the farmers here did not have much experience, or any experience for that matter, in raising as Sam pointed out. Local farmer by the name of Glenn Rhodes was one of the vanguards in this, and that’s where Sam has been working quite extensively in helping him to raise hemp out there. 

5:56 Ty: So you guys have been called in sort of, since it’s been illegal for so long, it’s been this new opportunity. So now, the question is, sort of, well how do we do this? And how do we do this well? And how do we do this efficiently? And, Dr. D, you’ve been on the chemistry side of it, where I’m sure you’re trying to hold that legal standard of being beneath the level of THC required for it to be hemp. And Sam, you've been working to see what kinds of methods in the area are actually going to best yield the crops. 

6:26 Dr. Downey: Yeah, and to further subdivide the hemp community, there’s an industrial hemp involved in production of fiber material, and then there’s the CBD hemp. Both of them have their own particular sets of challenges. Either way, the state is regulating this material and the criterion that they use so that the cannabis could be legal is less than three tenths by weight percent of tetrahydrocannabinol, which is the THC component of that. That’s a psychoactive component that grows in cannabis that’s produced in an area of a plant called the flower inflorescence on little sticky things that protrude from the flower called trichomes. And what we’ve learned in this past year and a half has been: the hemp plant is basically a little chemical factory that produces literally hundreds of different types of chemicals. And many of these different chemicals that plant produces have alleged medicinal benefits and, Sam, you might want to comment more about that.

7:29 Dr. Morton: Well, Dan’s right, and I think he uses the word alleged medical benefits as an appropriate way to approach it, because one of the consequences of the long illegality of cannabis as a research crop at all is that we aren’t sure about what it does or doesn’t do, or the mechanisms that it undergoes to actually cause an effect. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence out there for people who feel better, but there’s not a good deal of understanding of what the mechanism that brings that improvement in physical condition. And that’s speaking specifically to the CBD components. It’s also unclear at this point what the other cannabinoids do that are-- there’s about twelve in general in this organism and we’re not sure how they work together or how they work in concert. So, um, but in terms of the plant itself, Dr. D did a pretty good job of outlining the challenge. But the four variants of hemp, we’ll call them four variants. There are the agriculturally specific versions of the fiber hemp. When we grow that, we’re mainly not hoping for a good flower or a good seed head, we grow that mainly for the stem, so that that fiber can then be used in industrial purposes, mainly textiles or other material. The second variant being a feedstock predominantly will be used for animal feed, but there we’re going for the seed production and not necessarily the fiber or the flower. The third variant would be the CBD-centric hemp, that way we’re going after the non-hallucinogenic cannabinol, or psychoactive cannabinol. And the fourth variant would be medical marijuana, recreational marijuana which we currently are not actively involved with in Virginia. But the purpose of that is neither of the first three-- it’s actually THC. So, Just kind of keep, kind of a clarity on that. But at a basic level, it’s the same species, the only difference in industrial hemp and cannabis and marijuana or the other is a number. 

9:27 Ty: Yeah, so there’s a ton of versatility with this plant itself, and people are finding all sorts of uses for it. In Virginia, like you said, the THC is illegal. However, with the CBD, which has been one of the newer findings, people have anecdotal experiences that say it’s helpful, but you all are saying, you know, the way in which it’s helpful and the actual mechanism itself is still very much unknown and requires a lot more research to be sure about that. 

9:58 Dr. Downey: That is absolutely correct. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence out there. You can spend two seconds on the internet, you will find all sorts of testimonials about how great CBD products are. But the fact of the matter is, is that there is no dosage, you know, there is no expectation of a result based upon how much you would consume. What the chemical form would be, how it would be distributed, whether it be a salve or a pill or a gummy or a tincture, there’s so many different things out there, and just watching CBD products explode in the marketing arena over the last year has just been incredible. I mean, you can’t walk into a convenience store without seeing a sign saying “We sell CBD products,” and many of the health food stores and so on are selling the CBD products. All of which, I guess, it’s up to the consumer to figure out what they want and so on. But they’re not cheap and that’s part of the dilemma there. You’re probably gonna spend sixty or seventy dollars for a bottle of CBD tincture, for example, in many of the local stores, which will last you about a month according to the dosages that they recommend. So there’s, you know, it’s very nebulous for scientists who’s dealing, used to dealing with pharmaceuticals and dosage based on body weight, age, and other factors, you know. This is very shaky ground.  

11:21 Dr. Morton: We’re into the area of nutritional supplements and nutraceuticals with CBD at this particular point. And part of that, part of the challenge isn’t that there’s a lack of interest. It’s that the only source of official CBD would have been marijuana produced by the federal government for forensics lab qualifications. And at one point, before the Farm Bill change, there was about a five year wait time to be authorized to actually employ this, to get access to any of it to do research on. So most programs actually avoided it and now there are some, there’s some work that’s been done in Europe and some work that has been done in Canada, but at the same time it isn’t as clear as using the, kind of, the models that we generally follow. I would actually also add into that, you know, since I am a chemical engineer and part of my concern has to do with its processing capabilities, it’s very unclear, with most of the products that are available out there, their actual purity and their quality. And that’s one of the things that Dan (Downey) has worked on in his laboratory with some of the local CBD folks, is to kind of give them an understanding of what they have. Maybe not necessarily qualified or an official analysis, but so that they know that they’ve got sort of what they promised. That's always one of those “buyer beware” things when you pick it up in the store. 

12:36 Ty: Dr. D, could you say a little bit about, and we’re talking about sort of consistency in product, what are you sort of finding in terms of spread amongst plants in some of your research in terms of establishing some sort of standard of measurement?

12:49 Dr. Downey: Well, what I find is that the amount of CBD that’s produced ratio to the amount of THC in a plant is pretty consistent-- 20 to 25 is the ratio of one to the other, and most of the growers are wanting to grow their plants until they produce a maximum amount of CBD. But, unfortunately, this is causing some of their numbers to exceed three tenths percent THC limits, and if the study finds that to be the case, they will force the farmer to destroy his crop. And that’s a bad thing because these crops are really expensive, they’re labor consumptive. Many issues associated with them that the farmer has exerted in order to grow this crop But if they go over three tenths of a percent of THC, then they’re illegal, and the crop must be destroyed. And so, a huge economic blow to any given grower. And so that’s something I’d actually like to see change, the levels. I think it’s a federal, am I right on that, Sam? (Dr. Morton: This is a federal regulation, yes.) You know, so it can’t just be changed by the state .But the fact is this, it’s just too low. If your growing has CBD, CBD is actually an antagonist when it comes to THC, so the more CBD that you have, the less the effect of THC of the plant on the consumer. So, I think it’s, I think it’s too low. And I think that that’s why many of the farmers are exceeding what the levels are for legality, but yet at the same time, their intent is not to produce something that’s psychoactive. Their intent is to produce a CBD product. 

14:27 Dr. Morton:  Yeah, I mean it’s an unfortunate fact of the way hemp was legalized through an agricultural bill. It did not… It wasn’t until 2018 that industrial hemp was actually defined at the federal level as something different than marijuana. Components of hemp have always been legal: sterilized seed, the fiber material. But there have been components that have always been illegal since the 30s. And so part of the consequence of that is that, if I’m a farmer and I’m growing, you know, a crop of CBD and it exceeds the level only slightly, in other agricultural crops we blend those together (we’d combine two or three batches together to drop the level below) and then it would be alright. But in this particular space, it's about point of origin based analysis, not the point of processing. So actually, that’s part of the challenge that we're in right now, is that the legislative understanding is slow to catch up with the reality of the processing understanding that the higher CBD crops, which, as Dan pointed out, tend to be higher in THC, are the only rational processing component. It’s an instrument economics problem we run into. The equipment and the machinery and the techniques and the chemicals required to do an effective and safe extraction are too expensive for low-yield CBD crops. And so, I alluded to the fact that we were focusing predominantly on fiber and seed. That’s what we think is the best large scale crop for the Valley, but in about 2018, the same time the Farm Bill came around, the entire focus for the state’s industrial hemp programs actually largely changed to focus on CBD. There was an explosion of small farmers who were really interested in growing CBD-centric hemp and so, as a result, there’s a lot of uncertainty out there and a lot of small farmers trying to do it. And that has kind of taken some of the wind out of the sails of the other aspects of industrial hemp. 

16:20 Ty: Absolutely. So in a lot of ways, for the smaller farmers to take advantage of this in terms of the federal limit itself, it is incredibly limiting when they don’t have the means and the equipment to actually keep up with the scale that’s required. 

16:35 Dr. Morton: Yeah, but they won't know that their crop has exceeded the THC level till after it's already grown, they've taken care of it, and they've harvested it and it's sitting someplace. At which point, when the test occurs, they get a result back then they have to destroy it retroactively. They have to find it and destroy it wherever it's at, and that that is a significant challenge for a farmer to begin with. To know that you've gone through the entire process of incurring all this costs only to have, at that point, nothing in return. Exceeding the CBD-- the THC levels in health does not trigger any form of crop insurance either. It is 100% loss at that point.

17:14 Dr. Downey: One other thing that's kind of lagged because of the speed with which this crop has been developed, is the availability of places where it can be extracted. We now have two facilities in Rockingham County that didn't exist last year at this time, that are extracting. And there's different methods for extracting the cannabinoids out of the hemp. One is called CO2 extraction, supercritical fluid carbon dioxide extraction, and another is using some sort of solvent, specifically  the case in Rockingham County, ethanol as an extract. Both have their advantages. And that's one of the things we are actually looking at in our research is to determine what the composition of the products are from the extracts from these. Some farms, some of the extractors are also going one step further after extraction and cleaning the material up in a form called isolate. So you can buy what they call broad-spectrum or full-spectrum or isolate products, each one of them has a little bit different meaning in terms of the way it was prepared and to the final product, whether it's a salve or a tincture, whatever. I have talked with a whole lot of people, as Sam has as well, that use these materials. I personally do not. But I do know people who do, and some people are firm believers in their effectiveness on things like arthritis, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and so on. Some people also feed these products to their animals. There's a lot of dog biscuits out there that contain CBD that you can purchase. So, lots of different ways that the product is distributed. Many of the local farmers are actually getting into the cottage industry of selling their products themselves, direct internet sales. They'll extract it themselves on a small scale and then make products and sell them. Others are going to the extractors to have their product extracted, and then they'll either pay directly for the extraction process or do it on a shared basis where they share their extract with the extractor on some ratio basis to pay off the cost of extraction. So that part of the industry is developing here, so that's the wave of the future I'll say.

19:31 Ty: Yeah, absolutely. And it feels like the momentum around here is absolutely shifting towards more CBD but I think the question is, can we measure it well and give farmers the means to keep up with the amount of THC present in their crops so that they're able to save money and deliver an effective product? There's already products out on the market now that are present that we may or may not know, ratio-wise, what those exist at now, obviously under the legal limit. But more so in a way of some of the deeper chemical composition, so it's more of a matter of the research that you guys are doing is vital to knowing... It's vital to helping farmers understand what they're growing and producing and also understanding what's out in the stores because it's already there, it's a matter of what's actually there.

20:21 Dr. Downey: If someone purchases a product from the store, they should be able to provide them with what's called a COA or certificate of analysis, and that's from a certified lab that's called ISO labs that are certified to do the analysis. The grower or the producer of the product pays this person to do the analysis and then they'll provide this documentation that certifies what's in that product and how much CBD, for example, is in the product. And that's, that's something that anyone who purchases a tincture or salve or whatever from a commercial supplier should request. 

20:59 Ty: So I'm wondering, sort of specifically, what are the sorts of things that you guys are working on right now? What are your current projects?

21:08 Dr. Downey: Well one project that I'm currently developing is that we have actually set up a laboratory at a local extractor. JMU engaged in what we call an MOU, memorandum of understanding, with this company, and they will share their information with us and we'll share our information with them. We actually have set up a laboratory at this facility, so we can do online testing of their products as they are making it, which is huge because we have a more rapid turnaround time therefore we can develop tweaking, so to speak, of the process to help them make the process more efficient, less time consuming, producing better quality product. So that's something that we're currently working on we're also working on improving some of the laboratory methods so we can have true streamlined lab methods here at JMU. We have a really fabulous laboratory here. I'm bragging a little bit. It's a great lab. We have a lot of equipment and I have a lot of excellent students that are working on this. So, that's where we are, how about you, Sam?

21:12 Dr. Morton: Originally, I started out in this particular end in the hemp program working on the processing side where I would have been interfacing with industrial partners, but I mean I grew up on a farm so I've sort of come all the way back to my origin. And I've been working on the cultivation side. There's a lot of questions about how to grow hemp. I mean, first off, I guess I should be clear: We don't have any really indigenous hemp stocks that we can draw from right now. All of our hemp has to be imported from other countries. The seed stocks, though, predominantly we've used to come from the Ukraine, that come from Spain, France, and from Canada. All of these places have different climatological regions; they have different growing windows and so the plant itself is not acclimated to Virginia. And so part of our challenges is trying to find where, in our particular growing window, is the right time to start and the right time, the length of time to go. Additionally, which particular variants work well if we have to use Canadian hemp, which type of Canadian helps work well. If we're trying to use Ukrainian or Polish hemp-- the best hemp we ever had came from Poland, actually. It's been a challenge for us to be able to hit the window because each one of these seed, I guess, supplier sources have different growing windows. And so we've, over the last about five years, kind of focused down around the last week of May, first week of June seems to be the right window for large scale outdoor cultivation. Now, CBD is not likely to be grown in that manner. CBD is much more akin to the way we grow tobacco and individualize rows with individualized separated plants; the growing behavior and spacing are fundamentally different between fiber, seed, and CBD. And you'll see that there's a bit of a shift in the CBD groups toward more controlled environments which actually ends up being somewhat in greenhouse environments or reclaimed large scale open facilities like the turkey facilities or poultry barns in the Valley. And so there've been kind of changes in that particular space. But my interest has been shifted as a chemical engineer has focused a little bit more on what we get out of the plant, and we have recently started working on uptake of heavy metals. I was interested in industrial hemp years ago when I was a researcher at the University of Kentucky for energy feedstocks and for environmental remediation potentials. It’s a very, very interesting plan for that particular behavior. The part of the thing that makes it a good remediation crop makes it a terrible food crop, because if it's going to pull heavy metals up, where in the plant do those heavy metals go? Do they go into the seed? Do they go into the flower? If you're going to extract this material and then consume it, did that heavy metal contamination transfer over to the extraction? Is it leftover in some of the less refined components? So that's some of the work we've been started up recently; and we've started to talk with the National Institutes of Standards and Technology about working with them in that particular space as well as potentially to supply them with some laboratory qualification materials.

25:08 Ty: Wow, that's awesome. I could say just as a just common consumer of things, I would have no idea that all of this work and measurement, and meticulation of very specific variables goes into all this and it sounds like you guys are doing some really helpful work for these farmers in the Shenandoah area and I'm sure they're very appreciative of the stuff you guys are figuring out. Thank you guys. So what would you both like people to take away from our conversation here today?

25:40 Dr. Downey: I'm gonna address that first. I mean we've talked about CBD, we talked about industrial hemp and all that. Um, I think we need, as a society, to very carefully consider hemp as an alternative, such as it was used in the past before it became illegal, for a variety of different products, and I'm coming at this from a little bit of an environmental perspective. You know, as I've told you at the beginning, my main area of chemistry is environmental chemistry. And hemp is a plant that's renewable, I mean, you grow a crop every year. And many of the uses for hemp would replace things that are not as renewable such as tree populations, for example making paper. It’s a magical plant. I have come to learn that there is an incredible number of chemicals that are produced but also the very nature of the plant, the fibrous material that you have when you can make things like paper from it, and building materials, and so on down the list. This is what we need to be thinking about: growing hemp as an alternative to some of the things that we have been doing, you know that have had more adverse effects on the environment. So I think it's an environmentally sustainable plant. And that's one of the things that I look forward to in the future, is hearing more about that. We need to take some of the shackles off of growing hemp that the government bureaucracy has placed on farmers, so that it can find its own level.

27:09 Dr. Morton: I echo what Dan says. It wasn't really until, I guess the turn of the last century that hemp fell out of favor. Even as late as I guess as far back as the 1890s, the federal government expected 85 plus percent of all paper produced in the United States to be originating from hemp fiber. That disappeared in a matter of 10 years. It wasn't wasn't until the 30s that we really had a successful alternative to a domestic crop for fiber materials, so most of the fibrous material that pushed hemp out of the market was being produced in Brazil and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere. But hemp itself actually really didn't disappear fully in the United States until the 50s, but it had been driven out of the market by the production of nylon in the 1930s. And so we're really looking at potentially a return to some of these biologically based fiber materials, which will benefit Virginia's former textile industries which perished around the same period of time. Also, potentially being able to shift into market spaces that are already used and satisfactory with biologicals, but might add an extra element to that. And I mean. in particular. into the feedstocks and the food category because hemp itself has an awful lot of the similar benefits to soybeans have, in terms of omega three, omega six fatty acids as well but they have far less of the lectins which tend to be the allergens that come out of soy based products. And so there are individuals who are able to use the flour that's produced by, and flour in the sense of baking flour, as an alternative to wheat flour and that avoids individuals who have gluten sensitivity or some of the other digestive issues around wheat proteins. And so there's a really interesting opportunity here if we consider the plant different than its cousin. So, part of the biggest challenge we have, and most people, when they hear about cannabis and hear about industrial hemp, the first thing they think about is pot. And even though they are the same plant, way down at the base level, they are so different in the way they can be used as to be considered two separate species and that's part of the challenge of that taxonomy problem. And there are individuals who consider there to be two or three different species of cannabis plants. But one of the takeaways I'd like for them to understand is that, number one, they're different, but to also be a bit skeptical about the claims that are being made about what they can or can't be done for. I mean I can... It is a magical plan in the way Dan points it out, but the processing technology has gone. We don't have the capacity in the eastern seaboard of the United States to actually convert the material into those biological feedstocks right now, because that disappeared, along with the fiber based industries of the past. And so that's some of the stuff that we need to think about if we want this sustainable bio-based industry to regrow, we have to be willing to actually invest in developing the infrastructure again, because it is fundamentally gone.

30:17 Ty: Yeah, absolutely. It seems that we're really trying to reclaim a plant that has so many potentials and to build the infrastructure to actually utilize that potential. When, and a lot of times, people that make a lot of decisions for us have been very disconnected from the actual nuances of the plant itself. So, in a lot of ways, we are reclaiming the textile industry and the means by which that could really stimulate the Virginia economy as well. It's really important, as well as carbon footprint as well. Taking out some of the weight that is put on trees and putting more so on paper, like you were saying Dr. D. Thank you both. That's very well said. So given that you are both professors at JMU, and you've had a variety of experiences all over academia, what advice would you give to your undergrad self?

31:08 Dr. Morton: Well let's see. Probably ought to exercise more, if you want to be honest. I did procrastinate, read, do your homework... maybe ought to exercise a little bit more. But no, I mean I think if I were going to go back and talk to my, let's talk about my 18 year old self right when I went to college. I’d probably tell myself to go find where I'm uncomfortable intellectually and explore that space. I was a chemical engineer from the beginning. I have been a chemical engineer for all the degrees I have, but I have found after I kind of moved into my discipline that I could explore the things on the side, the interesting side relationships, the classes that weren't standard for engineering students. I would kind of push myself to find more of those and to take advantage of the time I had as an undergraduate, when I didn't have to have a job necessarily and I didn't have to think about what I was going to do with myself, I could just explore the intellectual space and I would encourage myself to do that.

32:06 Dr. Downey: I would encourage myself to take some more business-related classes. When I was an undergraduate, I focused entirely on the sciences; and graduate school and so on ever since. But I think it's important to have a perception of how the business world works. And I would go back and do some of that so that I would have a better understanding of how the actual chemical industry is steered by the interests of business, including how hemp, at this stage in time, is going to be improved by better business dynamics.

32:44 Ty: Thank you both for your wisdom. It's much appreciated. I'm sure there are people out here that really need to hear it as well. So before we go, do either of you have anything that you would like to promote or plug?

32:57 Dr. Downey: Just waiting for COVID to be over. (Laughs.) It's really challenging to do outreach in this climate. I mean everyone, obviously, has their own personal wrestling match with COVID effects. But many of the things that we do in my lab are integrated to the outside world, you know. We work with forest service, work with efficient game agencies and other agencies, as well as the hemp farmers and so forth. And it's really challenging right now to network and get together with people. And when this situation has ended, it's going to be a breath of fresh air so that we can actually get out and have face to face meetings and all that sort of thing. So, that's my two cents.

33:45 Dr. Morton: Well, and I guess the only thing I'll plug, and I’ll make the Office of Research and Scholarship happy, is that I'll plug our Industrial Hemp Research Program website if anyone has any additional interest or questions. You can find it at jmu.edu/research/hemp. And that should give you at least a starting point in connecting with all of the researchers involved in not only Dr. Downey's laboratory work and my field of processing work, but also the economist, Dr. C.K. Lee is working with us, as part of our GO Virginia initiative to help start answering some of the questions about economic development in the hemp space and about; and so, again, I encourage you to investigate that and if you've got interests and you've got questions. I'm always available to answer those questions so if you have.

34:37 Ty: Well, thank you both for your time and your expertise. I really enjoyed it. Well Dukes, that's all that we've got time for today. Thanks so much for listening with us. If you'd like to interact with us some more, follow us on social media @JMUWellDukes or shoot us an email at welldukes@jmu.edu. Be sure to tune in next week for another new and exciting episode and I hope you have a wonderful day. And remember, be well, Dukes.
If you're listening to this episode for HTH100, the passcode is "hemp".