A Cannabis Entrepreneurship Seminar took place on March 14 organized by Students for Sensible Drug Policy. The event was hosted by Otha Smith III, the founder & CEO of Tetragram, a digital journal that helps users track their cannabis.
Smith is a Maryland native with his company Tetragram being located in Baltimore. Smith states that he has always been an entrepreneur as he started his first company in high school. His company was in detailing cars and was able to grow his business to have contractual relationships with car dealerships. He was able to not only detail cars but marinas, boats, and small planes. His business helped him be able to put himself through college but unfortunately, he had to close down the business due to the 2008 recession.
He would then go to work for Constellation Energy, one of the largest producers of carbon-free energy, for 10 years. Smith at Constellation Energy was selling electrical and gas commodities. Smith saw how cannabis started to take off around the country and wanted to dive in. Smith states that he grew up in the rural part of Maryland and it was notorious for growing cannabis. He states that he has been around cannabis since he was 13 years old.
The idea of Tetragram came to Smith due to an unfortunate accident. In 2006, Smith and some friends were involved in a car accident trying to drive home. Smith states that he fell asleep at the wheel and was ejected around 30 feet from the car. This would result in a 6-inch scar on the top of his head and needs 30 staples to close the wound. He would also suffer a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
To treat his TBI, doctors gave him pills to manage the pain that he had in his knees and joints. Smith is a holistic person as his family is from Barbados and is into traditional plant-based medicine. After three years of using prescription pills and suffering from the effects that came with them, he decided to make a change.
“Once Colorado started legalizing cannabis years later, I’ll never forget, I jumped at the opportunity hopped on a flight flew out there,” said Smith. ”And I was like, the same people use cannabis in so many different ways. I was like ‘Oh, my god’, this is completely new to me.”
Smith walked into a dispensary and was able to see cannabis in different ways outside of the flower and in many different other ways such as concentrates and oils.
“That’s when I realized there’s so much more to this plant that, you know, I’m just scratching the surface of,” said Smith.
Even though Smith had been using cannabis since the age of 13, he was learning terminology he had not known before such as terpenes and cannabinoids. Terpenes are the essential oils that are responsible for the aroma characteristics of cannabis. Cannabinoids are a class of biological compounds that bind to cannabinoid receptors.
Smith knew people who were starting to get into the cannabis industry. He saw that budtenders were making recommendations to customers but had no data to rely on to make great recommendations. Smith wanted to give people a way to understand what products are going to work best for them.
“That’s what led me to create tetragram, because one of the things that I noticed in dispensaries is that they were either selling paperback journals or they were provided providing them for free,” said Smith. “And since everything we do is on our phone, I figured like why not build an app where people can do just that.”
One of the newer features that the app has is a person has a QR code built into their profile. This allows the person to take the QR code to the dispensary. It tells the user and the budtender what products they use, the intent behind it, and how the person feels about the product. This allows the budtender to find a better understanding of what the user is trying to find. Tetragram currently has 300 dispensary partners nationwide.
Smith states that Tetragram does research as well and one of their studies was with veterans. The research was with Dr. Marion McNabb, the president of the Cannabis Center of Excellence (CCOE). They were able to find that most of the veterans only needed about 15% – 17% THC. Smith states that one of the misconceptions is that people shouldn’t shop for THC amounts. This is where industries have taken advantage of consumers’ lack of information by selling based on THC content states Smith.
Another misconception is a lot of the testing labs that put up the THC amount is false. One of the ways to combat this is federal legalization of cannabis to get proper researching on the THC amounts. Smith advises people to take control of their own personal journey with cannabis.
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