Alex the Chemist

High! Canada Magazine had the extreme pleasure of sitting down with Alex the Chemist also known as Alexzander Samuelsson. He works for NextLeaf Solutions as lead chemist out of Vancouver BC and we were lucky enough to catch him between meetings recently in Toronto.

Tell us Alexzander, you're a chemist, what led you down the path into the cannabis industry?

After I graduated university I tried to get a job for about a year and a half. I sent over 400 applications with cover letters, resumes with no response. After, I went through a period of depression I was on SSRI's, anxiety medication and Aderall just to balance it all out. I was with my dad on his 50th birthday, and I decided to share a joint with him after not trying cannabis for many years. After I shared that joint with him , it literally opened up a new horizon. I felt like me again, I was giddy, I was happy; I was positive and curious again. All these things came rushing at me intensely. When you're on pharmaceutical drugs it can really dampen down your emotional state and your ability to think and experience reality. My dad had always been cannabis friendly and it was just a random act of sharing that I impulsively decided to try cannabis again after it had negative effects on me in the past. This was overwhelmingly positive and as a bored out-of-work chemist with the internet, I needed to know how does this work for me and what mechanism arises to give me this kind of relief?

I s t h e r e a n y n e w r e s e a r c h a n d development out right now that you're excited about?

The thing that excites me the most is when the new regulations will come in for concentrates and that will open up consumers to what is already available in the recreational market in dispensaries. Shatter, waxes, vape pens, edibles, topicals, suppositories, slow release patches, I've even seen THC infused sugar.

I'm really excited for vape pens. I found when I started smoking after 3 months, because I was a non-smoker I was starting to cough up grey stuff and that shocked and kind of scared me so I moved almost entirely to vaping and I appreciate them more because you get the desired effects. That's also what we are excited for with our extraction technology, for separating, isolating and purifying different compounds so that we can formulate different kinds of pens.