Winning With Cannabis

Green House Healthy with CEO Heather DeRose. Listed in Green Market Report’s 100 Most Important Women in Weed 2020, Heather is the CEO and Co-Founder of Green House Healthy, a health and wellness company educating about the benefits of cannabis as part of a healthy and active lifestyle. Her company creates healthy experiences by hosting educational and athletic events, instructing cannabis positive fitness and nutrition classes, and providing media and consulting services. She is a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, sponsored trail runner, multimedia journalist, international public speaker, and epilepsy warrior. In 2017, she became the first female to complete an entire national tour of the Civilized Games, formerly known as the 420 Games, which is an athletic event series focused on raising awareness about cannabis and its consumers. In 2018 she competed in over 10 races around Colorado, including a Spartan and leading an 8 person 114-mile relay race. In 2019, she conquered a half marathon in Colorado, a 30k and a full marathon in Missouri. She places in many of her races and plans to continue racing to raise awareness for epilepsy, healthy lifestyles, and the benefits of cannabis.

Rewind CBD with Rodney Wallace. In 2017 Things were looking up for Rodney. He had just signed with New York City FC, he was clean, and with his mindset to participate in Costa Rica’s team for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Nothing but clear skies ahead. That is until he started feeling a pain in his hip so horrid that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to walk, and much less play, again. He couldn’t even play with his own daughter. He started taking prescribed pain medication again because it wasn’t like he had much choice, but he used it responsibly and it helped. So he started taking CBD as a part of his routine. Besides his hip, he’d massage his knees or his back with it and felt a lot better. Before bed, he took the tincture and woke up feeling great. He also took the medicine to the locker room, but there he was forced to hide it. “This seems childish,” he would think. “That I'm hiding something that's so good for me, that’s supposed to be legal.” It certainly is. By this stage, he was at the pinnacle of his career, with no intention of quitting any time soon. His dream of being on the national team for Costa Rica came true. It was everything to him.

Blue Island Yoga with Martha Triantafillides. Martha grew up traveling the globe, garnering an education in interior design which led to her founding the first contemporary gallery in Dubai (UAE). She later studied yoga as a path to self-discovery with certifications from yoga centers in Canada, England, and Thailand, and is the founder of Blue Island Yoga. Wana Brands’ mission is to help people enhance their lives physically, creatively, and emotionally through the responsible use of cannabis. Wana Brands products offer athletes consistency and quality. The popular products are available in Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, Michigan, and Illinois.

The First Sanctioned Medical Cannabis Athlete with Top-ranked middleweight fighter Elias “the Spartan” Theodorou. Elias amassed an impressive 8-3 record during his time in the UFC, beginning his run with the company as the first-ever Canadian winner of their famed reality show/tournament, The Ultimate Fighter. Other firsts in Elias’s career includes making history as the first male ring cardholder or RING BOY™, now actively utilized by four different MMA organizations and counting, the most prominent of which is the all-female promotion Invicta FC. No stranger to breaking barriers, Elias is also committed to #FightTheStigma of medical cannabis in athletics. It was during his time with the UFC, Elias became the first professional athlete to apply for Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) through the USADA (https://www.usada.org) and a member other WADA (www.wada-ama.org).

Total Health Care THC with Dr. Uma Dhanabalan. Dr. Uma worked for Kimberly Clark as Regional Medical Director for the Asia Pacific She worked for the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, the largest and most complex cleanup projects in the world, where plutonium was manufactured for the first nuclear bomb detonated in Japan. She created the Total Health Care THC model where she “Educates Embraces Empowers” patients and promotes cannabis as a treatment option at Uplifting Health and Wellness, in Natick, Massachusetts. She is an advocate, activist, and educator and speaks globally about cannabis as a plant medicine. Her mission is to change the Stigma regarding Cannabis and for the world to know about the Endocannabinoid system through education. Dr. Dhanabalan states “Cannabis is not for everyone, yet it should be a first-line option, not the last resort” and “Cannabis is not an entrance drug, it is an exit drug from Pharmaceuticals, Narcotics, Nicotine, and Alcohol.

Anna Symonds is a champion rugby player whose career includes a USA Rugby Division I National Championship (2014), selection to the National All-Star Competition, and a Sydney Premiership Championship (2003). She represented the USA at the 2015 Touch Rugby World Cup and has won three national championships in Touch with the Portland Hunters (2007, 2013, 2017).

Snowboarding pioneer Greta Gaines became the face of the sport when it was dominated by men. A former competitive skier, Gaines’s teenage fearlessness and punk rock ethos made her an icon, even if her attitude turned off early 90s television sponsors like MTV and ESPN. Cannabis, she says, has always been part of her lifestyle and she thinks that snowboarders often have a copacetic relationship with weed, even if they’re not entirely sure why they’re getting stoned. Gaines remembers being in the back country hills of Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 1987 — just as the snowboarding scene was really hitting the mainstream. Cannabis brought the disparate riders together.

Athletes for care with Ryan VandenBussche. As an NHL hockey player, Ryan had the unique pleasure of being a teammate to four of the greatest hockey players in NHL history: Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier during his time as a New York Ranger, and Sydney Crosby and Mario Lemieux as a Pittsburgh Penguin. Those four legends combined to score a whopping 2,715 goals, but Ryan racked up huge numbers of his own in one category that few players would strive to match: injuries incurred as a result of playing the game.

BodyChek Wellness with Riley Cote. Riley is a former professional ice hockey left winger who played four National Hockey League (NHL) seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers and was mainly known as an enforcer. Upon retiring from the Philadelphia Flyers Riley founded the Hemp Heals Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization that promotes cannabis/hemp as a viable renewable resource, that can help increase the quality lives of all people.

CBD In the Recovery Community with professional skateboarder David Hafsteinsson. The pro skater from Iceland has been a fan of CBD topical creams and products for almost two years now, ever since he discovered them as a non-addictive, natural alternative to help his body cope with the rigors of pro skating. Free of opiates since 2015, Hafsteinsson brings us back to the start of his journey and how his views on recovery changed thanks to CBD. It all started at age 13, he said, when he broke his ankle during a skate session. His doctors prescribed Codeine for his pain. While the prescription drug delivered the expected results, many other injuries were right around the corner.