(Adolfo Gonzalez will be a panelist at the Georgia Straight's upcoming event, Grassroots: An Expo for the Cannabis Curious on April 7 and 8, 2018. Get your tickets now.)

Ever wondered what it takes to be a professional budtender? You might be surprised that it requires much more than simply “knowing your weed”.

Local educator, consultant, and all-around cannabis expert Adolfo Gonzalez operates CannaReps, an industry improvement organization that provides training for cannabis professionals in Canada.

With a background in cultivation, Gonzalez has been engaging with researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, growers, and medical professionals as a frontline worker for over 15 years and has developed a way to teach budtenders skills that will allow them to engage with their patients more effectively.

Through CannaReps, Gonzalez has already helped train employees at over 60 organizations. In an interview with the Georgia Straight, he said he’s looking forward to his next intake.

“Our course is really about clarifying the role of the budtender in society,” Gonzalez said in his downtown office.

The course begins with a full-day seminar that covers the basics of service, intake protocols, interpreting scientific evidence, and hands-on product knowledge. That is followed up by six monthly workshops.

“We want to keep our budtenders grounded, make sure they are acting responsibly, and, more importantly, get them to understand what quality product means and how to verify that,” he added.

With more than a decade of experience as a grower, Gonzalez said very few people actually know how to identify quality cannabis. Although he said that students shouldn’t expect to leave his course a “certified cannabis expert”, he is able to take that 10-year learning curve and condense it.

He isn’t a fan of traditional test structures, so instead of multiple-choice-question exams or surprise quizzes, students will be smelling, tasting, and touching different products in order to become familiar with them.

“Then we’ll get into the details. We’ll sit down with a lot of different versions of one strain, and then extracts that are made from that strain, and then we’ll examine test results and identify terpenes,” he said, asserting that the only way to learn how to determine quality is “by hanging out with a weed geek”.

An important resource, and the blueprint for the course, lies in Gonzalez’s Cann Help Deck, a comprehensive guide that compiles 12 years of face-to-face interactions with medical users, academic publications, and mentor information to outline specific areas of education. Each student gets the deck of reference cards as part of the CannaReps course.

Many local dispensaries use the deck, and in almost two years of use, Gonzalez says, he has only ever received positive feedback.

Created with his wife and business partner, Enid, the deck is divided into four sections that detail cannabinoids (THC, CBD, et cetera), different medical conditions and how they might be treated with cannabis, the various modalities for treatment (smoking, vaping, capsules, et cetera), and subspecies of cannabis (sativa, indica, ruderalis).

Although the deck is just one component of the course, it provides students with important information that Gonzalez says many doctors and researchers can’t provide.

“A lot of what you find working in the field is actually contradictory to what researchers and doctors will tell you, and they hold the power—but, unfortunately, they don’t have the experience to wield that power,” he said.

While the research community is often limited to studying specific products or compounds, the opportunities for anecdotal data collection at dispensaries are endless.

“Dispensaries have this unique positioning, where they have very broad population sizes and very broad product types that have effectively become the standard of treatment, so when doctors and academics are learning what they know based on studies that use isolated particles, even though the standard of treatment is full-profile medicine, it creates a bubble of misunderstanding.”

Ultimately, Gonzalez hopes to create a bridge between dispensary workers, growers, and academics by encouraging dispensaries to collect observational data for future study while also creating a training program for doctors and pharmacists who are still unfamiliar with cannabis in a medical context.

“When you start working with the research community, you realize why they’ve had all these blocks in advancement. I can only do so much,” he said. “We need the specialists to see the value of what we’ve built, what this community has accumulated, and where to start using it.”

CannaReps’ September term begins on September 24. Visit the CannaReps website to register, and enter “master” at checkout to get a 10-percent discount.