4 June 8 - 14, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Mr. Natural Cannabis company Wyatt Purp is rebelling against synthetic THC. (So is the government.) BY JACOB VAUGHN G od, Wyatt Larew believes, put him on Earth to share the cannabis plant with the world. In 2019, the year Texas legal- ized hemp, Larew received a kid- ney transplant that would inspire him on this mission to spread the word about a plant he feels spiritually connected with. His overactive immune system had dam- aged his kidneys over the years, and one of them had to be replaced. But the first time he did dialysis while awaiting a transplant, he went into SVT, or supraventricular tachy- cardia, causing his heart to race and abruptly stop or slow down repeatedly. His heart was hammering at 285 beats per minute as he lay in a hospital bed at St. David’s North Austin Medical Center. “It felt like I was in a vibrat- ing chair,” he says. “I saw everyone rush into the hospital room with paddles, and my doc- tor started crying. Then I went dark or had my near-death experience.” Larew says he saw what he believes to be the afterlife as he left his body and heard Je- sus say repeatedly, “The word is my sword.” He awakened in the hospital’s intensive care unit. He became religious after that and to- day believes that everyone is an immortal part of God. Larew’s work with the cannabis plant is God’s plan for him. Some months after his near-death expe- rience, Larew’s son persuaded his girl- friend’s mother to give Larew one of her kidneys. Three weeks before the transplant, his wife left him. “So, I’ve had to start over from nothing and put all my faith in God, and this is where I’m at now,” he says. The transplant, about three and a half years ago, requires him to take a regimen of life-saving drugs that costs about $1,800 each month. As he recovered from the sur- gery, he applied for hemp licenses and made plans to start a company called Wyatt Purp. Around the same time, companies across the country began manufacturing and sell- ing a form of cannabis products called hemp-derived THCs. Most of these are cre- ated in laboratories, where their makers use chemical reactions to convert naturally oc- curring cannabinoids into variants of the compound THC. The synthesized chemi- cals differ slightly in structure from delta-9 THC, which produces the high from con- suming the plant and is regulated by law. To many consumers, particularly in states like Texas where recreational cannabis is still outlawed, it didn’t matter how the products were made as long as they could get users high and could be found on store shelves. But it matters to Larew and his company, Wyatt Purp. The market for these lab-created products has exploded in recent years, but he wants no part of it. To him, everyone taking these lab-derived THCs may as well be lab rats. Few, if any, regulations guide how they are made, and no one really knows the long-term effects of ingesting them. Larew looks at their creation as corrupting the cannabis plant. Larew’s main mission, the one he says God saved him for, is to bring natural cannabis products to the world. “Everybody else sells synthetic isomers,” Larew says. “They basi- cally manufacture their drugs. I don’t do that.” Manufacturers argue that because state and federal cannabis regulation limits delta-9 specifically, other isomers derived from naturally occurring chemicals in can- nabis are legal. Both state and federal offi- cials disagree, and the legal hemp industry is staring at potential bans that many busi- nesses say would run them into the ground. But Larew hasn’t touched the stuff and says he’s been able to get by, though even his company has dealt with legal struggles com- mon in an industry in which the line between legal and illegal is murky at best. As he sees it, he’s serving God while others in the industry have been playing God in lab coats. Hemp was federally legalized in 2018, and Texas passed a similar law legalizing the plant in 2019. These laws allow cannabis products that contain less than 0.3% delta-9 THC. Manufacturers figured that as long as their products didn’t exceed that limit, they could do whatever they wanted with other forms of THC, such as delta-8, which will also get users high but is generally said to be less potent. The problem is that these other com- pounds generally don’t occur naturally in the plant in sufficient quantities to produce the desired effects. Manufacturers can ex- tract natural cannabinoids from the plant and, by applying other chemicals, engineer it into delta-8, delta-10 or any other psycho- active THC isomer. This has created an ex- plosive market of hemp-derived, lab-created THCs. Larew initially wanted in on the action but has since become intent on selling only natural THC products, mostly compliant delta-9 gummies and THCa flower. (THCa is a precursor to delta-9, and some would argue over its legality.) Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued advisories in 2021 about products with lab-created THC isomers like delta-8, warning about adverse effects and saying that the way they’re manufactured could cause them to be contaminated by harmful materials. Dr. Christopher Hudalla, president and chief scientific officer of ProVerde Laborato- ries, says that’s not quite correct. “It’s not that it could cause contamination. It does,” he says. Hudalla and others have been trying to sound the alarm on these products. ProV- erde Laboratories is a testing firm with facil- ities in Massachusetts. His lab has tested thousands of synthesized products, and all of them have significant levels of contamina- tion, but nobody wants to talk about it, he says. “These are chemical compounds that do not exist in nature,” Hudalla says of the contamination. He thinks it’s possible to make these products and take out the contaminants, “but it’s expensive, and that’s the problem. “We have a little bit better idea today of what those contaminants are,” Hudalla said. “We still don’t know if those are toxic, but we do know that these chemicals are not found in nature, so we don’t know how they interact with the human body. We do not know if it causes birth defects or miscar- riages. We do not know if they cause cancer. We have zero evidence that they don’t cause cancer. These are foreign chemicals that are being put into human bodies.” When he talks to state regulators, Hu- dalla says their initial reaction is to just shut down the synthetic business entirely. “But they’re already widely available,” he says. “It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle.” A better strategy, he contends, would be for states to pass laws prohibiting the sale of contaminated products, allowing the manu- factured isomers to stay on the market if their makers clean up their wares. “I’m a very strong proponent of delta-8 and potentially other synthetics,” Hudalla says. “If the state says, ‘You can’t sell con- taminated product,’ you would essentially shut down the industry.” All these compa- nies would either go out of business or have to change their practices, he says. Hudalla says he’s been able to remove the contaminants from these products, but when he tells producers they can do the same, they ask him, “Why would I do that? Nobody makes me.” Mike Brooks | UNFAIR PARK | >> p6 Wyatt Larew (right) and Dustin Ragon are the co-founders of Wyatt Purp.
