Brampton marijuana master spreads the good word about the former demon weed

Meet the woman with the dope on dope and whose last name includes pot.

Chantel Phillpotts, a 25-year-old Brampton resident, is an expert on all things you need to know about marijuana. Her website is called the Master Of Marijuana because of all the knowledge she has gained through her use and education of the drug and her desire to learn even more. Her goal in life is to learn as much as she can so she can one day become a consultant for anybody seeking to learn about marijuana and how to use it properly.

“This is something I’m really passionate about,” she said. “The cannabis industry is so big – I don’t see myself going anywhere else.”

She is a licensed Cannabis Sommelier having graduated in February from an online course in Canada that teaches everything you need to know about marijuana to become an expert. She is augmenting her marijuana journey in an online course in the U.S. She currently works at The Woods Cannabis store in Brampton, which opened in July.

“We demonized marijuana (as a society) because it was (considered) so dangerous, but within almost three years of legalization in Canada we’ve consumed it at a rate that’s increased drastically,” she said. “It’s actually scary. We’re consuming it senselessly because it’s available, so I’m trying to slow it down a little bit, trying to make people understand you don’t have to go so far so fast.”

It’s quite a stretch for someone who went to York University to study drama and become an actress. In her first year, her roommate introduced her to marijuana and it changed Phillpotts’ life.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing,’” she said. “No wonder people are buzzing about it all the time. All my life I had been told cannabis is the worst thing ever.”

It proved to be helpful for chronic asthma and severe anxiety issues she was experiencing and which caused her to be hospitalized many times.

“I took my first bowl and I could breathe in a way I couldn’t breathe before ever in my life,” she said. “I was using puffers and looking for things to breathe properly and all of a sudden I could exercise, actually run long distance which I couldn’t do before because of my health and my anxiety. When I was smoking marijuana I was just happy. I was feeling good and blissed.”

That gave her the inspiration to start learning about all things related to marijuana. She studied the history of cannabis and thought it was improperly portrayed by society and authorities who treated possession of pot as a criminal offence.

Four years after she started doing her research, possession and distribution of cannabis became legal in Canada, along with the sale of it in stores and online. Suddenly the negativity surrounding marijuana and users changed in a positive way and that’s when she knew she wanted to educate herself as much as possible. She worked for a while at the first licensed marijuana shop in Brampton.

“I was like, ‘hip, hip hooray, I’m in the cannabis industry and now I can finally educate people properly,” she said. “I was working and working but still seeing a lack of education, people not knowing how to consume it properly. It’s becoming more about capitalism than people finding the right cultivators for themselves. There are people who shouldn’t be running a cannabis store. It’s not that they are a bad person or anything like that, but if you do not have the credentials in the area you’re in you should either study to learn a little bit more or not be in that particular area. You started seeing health and safety issues in stores, some weird situations.”

She enrolled in YES BizStart Entrepreneurship, a paid six-month program for people between the ages of 16-29 to help them start their own business, and earned her certification. So began her business with the website name Freedom Herbs, but subsequently came up with the name Master of Marijuana, or MoM for short.

“I thought that’s such a beautiful name,” she said. “Marijuana is a female plant that we consume. It’s a woman, a mother, and it gives birth to seeds or buds and that’s what marijuana users love. I think we should respect a plant like that because it’s a mother.”

She loves working at The Woods Cannabis because it fulfills her marijuana journey. She is what the industry calls a budtender.

“There are a lot of cannabis products on the market that people should not be consuming and people don’t know that,” she said. “They really don’t know what the process is and I find there’s a lot of holes in the system that people aren’t being made aware of. We should be very concerned about what the next 15 to 30 years are going to look like in terms of our health and the way that we behave and the consumption rate and all that stuff. It makes me happy that I’m able to do that at that store and educate people.”