VetCBD was founded, formulated, and operated by cannabis industry pioneer, Dr. Tim Shu. He and the VetCBD team are dedicated to promoting the education, research, and advocacy of the therapeutic benefits of medical cannabis.

In 3 words, describe your organization.

Education, Research, Advocacy

What has been your biggest challenge and how your team has overcome it?

The greatest challenge that the cannabis industry faces in general is recency bias. For the past century, the US has told its citizens and the rest of the world that cannabis is a dangerous drug, worthy of Schedule I status. All scientific and medical evidence consistently points to that as a lie. As a result, the legalization of cannabis has been under a slow, piecemeal, and patchwork rollout. The result of this is that patients that could have and can benefit from cannabinoid therapeutics are unable to, and continue to suffer because of immoral and unethical policies. Additionally, many doctors are still convinced of what they learned in school, that cannabis has no medicinal value.

As a result, not only have they shunned cannabinoids, but also dismiss the notion of the Endocannabinoid System (ECS) having any significant role in the health of their patients. The ghost of prohibition past continues to linger over the lives of those who could benefit from it the most. This is one of the greatest moral and ethical failures of the 20th century, and it continues into the 21st century.

As part of our mission in advocacy, we’ve led efforts on the successful passage of two California cannabis bills, AB 2215 and AB 1885. These two bills allow California veterinarians to discuss and recommend cannabis for their patients.

What are some upcoming innovations/projects you are most excited for?

At the end of the day, without a better understanding of the ECS, we're doing our patients a great disservice. Here is a body system that is deeply intertwined with all other body systems and plays a crucial regulatory role in normal function, and yet the majority of the medical field ignores it, probably because it has the word "canna" in its name. The CB1 receptor of the ECS is the most abundant G protein-coupled receptor in the brain.

The current situation with the ECS is akin to science having discovered the endocrine system 30 years ago, and having modern day doctors ignore the role of hormones and their role in health and disease. Imagine your doctor not knowing what insulin does in the body. Replace "insulin" with "anandamide", and you understand that's where we're at with the ECS. Ask any new graduate from medical, veterinary, or nursing school what they learned about the ECS in school, and the most common answer is "nothing". As advanced as modern medicine is, our collective ignorance of the ECS gives us an idea of just how much further we need to go in order to do right by our patients and what it means to truly be advocates for those who have entrusted their care, and their lives, in our hands.

So what excites me is turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. Only by addressing these mysteries head-on can we begin to have a better understanding of the world and improve the lives of those who need it the most.

Any future predictions/trends you foresee in your product category?

Right now, the way product development in medical cannabis works is by throwing cannabinoids at any and every disease and seeing what sticks. It's a very brute force way of finding the potential benefits of cannabis. We know the ECS has variability from species to species, and even from patient to patient. So to me, a moonshot goal here is to utilize machine learning to model body systems at a detail sufficient enough to accurately predict the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of cannabinoids and other compounds for specific patients with specific conditions.