Patient advocate Christine Stenquist spent nearly a decade educating Utah voters on the potential of medical cannabis and ultimately helped to bring the state its own program in 2018. But now, as the president of Together for Responsible Use and Cannabis Education, she is hard at work trying to dismantle certain parts of the medical marijuana program she helped establish.
One of the issues she’s looking to address is concentrates being contaminated with delta-6a10a THC, an isomer with some similarities to delta-8, delta-9 and delta-10, but still largely unknown compared to other cannabinoids.
“We don’t have any information that shows how it metabolizes in the body,” Stenquist says.
As a brain tumor patient herself, Stenquist is advocating for the use of good manufacturing practices and standardization for Utah’s medical marijuana program. She says many cannabis patients have been failed repeatedly by the pharmaceutical world, “so they’re coming here to get away from synthetics, not for it to be adapted into our program.”
“My focus is on patient advocacy,” she adds. “There’s a difference between advocating for patients and advocating for cannabis. One is advocating for people’s rights the other is advocating for other people’s money.”