Episode 229 - Alex Eckman, Higher Thoughts Podcast
Episode 229 is the 27th episode of Season 4.
We're joined today by Alex Eckman, a cannabis chemistry graduate, extraction technician and host of the Higher Thoughts Podcast. Alex has spent about a decade in Michigan cannabis, a path that began when he left the fire service and turned to the plant as a last-resort medicine for chronic health issues. He worked through the state's wild-west caregiver era, then doubled down on the science and earned a cannabis chemistry degree, serving as vice president of his student government and sitting on the curriculum committee along the way. Today he is focused on education, advocacy and content creation under the banner of "merging studies with strategy," while looking to dig back in on the processing and R&D side of the industry.
We get into what his program was actually like, from an on-campus vape and hydrocarbon lab to the votes of no confidence he and his fellow students passed that flipped the school's stance on cannabis, and his case that the connections he made there mattered as much as the coursework. We dig into the surprising finding from his capstone research, evidence that some vape carts may leach a microplastic out of the hardware and into the oil, which he stumbled onto by accident after a sample caught fire inside the lab's electron microscope.
Then we pull up a chair on the consumer side: the Michigan concentrate market with live resin at three or four dollars a gram, his hack for buying cheap extract and dialing the terpenes back in himself, how far is too far before a dab turns harsh, the wholesale tax squeezing operators and where a chemist thinks the market and his own career head next.
Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and follow Higher Thoughts on Instagram.
Enjoy the show!
