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Jason Draizin is the CEO and Founder of MarijuanaDoctors.com - an online gateway connecting practitioners and patients seeking medical marijuana treatment. Marijuana Doctors was founded in the midst of the 2008 recession and built a streamlined solution for medical marijuana practitioners to market their practices, including SEO optimizations, web development, and e-commerce. Jason sits down with Chris Snyder to discuss the legislation and political forces impacting the medical marijuana industry today.
Jason Draizin is the Founder and CEO of MarijuanaDoctors.com - an online gateway designed to connect physicians with patients who are interested in pursuing medical marijuana cards.
This episode is sponsored by Juhll. They are a full service digital marketing consultancy that has over 20 years of experience helping your business grow sales online. They've helped most of their clients grow more than 50% year over year by helping them meet their digital marketing goals.
Juhll Digital Agency works with companies who are doing $50 million in top line revenue that have a marketing budget of $2 million. They build your company from the ground up and they also help you in creating a strategy that will work best for your team.
You can email Chris Snyder, President of Juhll Digital Agency, at chris@juhll.com, or contact their team today and find out which of their services will work best for your success story.
"We love solving problems. And this is an industry with a lot of problems, you know, whether you want to be compassionate to someone who is living a horrible, uncomfortable life and want you to help them make an easement." - Jason Draizin, MarijuanaDoctors.com
"After we kind of stabilized the search engine optimization and the keywords and phrases which people were working looking for, number one obviously being how to find a marijuana doctor, hence the name of the company we decided to launch MarijuanaDoctors.com." - Jason Draizin, MarijuanaDoctors.com
"And we've now adopted and we're going to be offering that technology for free for dispensaries so that they can handle curbside pickups, online ordering and then deliveries." - Jason Draizin, MarijuanaDoctors.com
Jason Draizin is the Founder and CEO of MarijuanaDoctors.com - an online gateway designed to connect physicians with patients who are interested in pursuing medical marijuana cards.
Chris Snyder [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Chris Snyder here, host of the Snyder Showdown President at Jewel dot com and founder of Banks dot com. We usually talk with industry leaders and entrepreneurs about what's working and what's not with their growth programs. But we actually decided to pivot the show and hear how industry leaders are guiding their teams through this tough time of COVID-19. A quick word from our sponsor. Juhll is a full-service digital consultancy, and we focus on helping executives solve their toughest digital growth problems while working as an extension of the executive team. We do three things. We quickly identify the biggest problems impeding growth. We have over 25 years of experience doing this. We propose solutions that give you the best opportunity for success. Finally, the work has to get done. So Jewel brings a private marketplace, a vetted world-class talent to execute your plan. Of course, we manage this whole process to learn more. You can go to jewel dot com. That's juhll.com. Or you can email us directly. It's Chris@juhll.com. Without further ado, my guest today is Jason Draizin. He's the CEO and Founder of Marijuana Doctors. They're an online gateway designed to connect physicians with patients who are interested in pursuing medical marijuana cards. To date, the company has assisted more than five hundred thousand patients and has an established network of thousands of physicians nationwide. Jason is going to share with us some insight on how COVID-19, has impacted THC and CBD companies, many of which have been deemed essential businesses in many states. Thank you, Jason. So I'd love to kick off the show by learning a little bit more about your background, your upbringing. Where were you born? How did you get to where you are today? So if you could spend a little bit of time on that, that would be great.
Jason Draizin [00:02:11] Sure, I was. I was born in this city, Manhattan. My family moved out to when my grandfather started doing real estate on Long Island. We moved out to Long Island. My father's side of the family was very into medicine. My father was one of the top otolaryngologists in the state of New York, and my grandfather was one of the creators of the commercial industrial Rietz after IPO in that company. They really decided that they wanted to go into assisted living homes, which was kind of a combination of both real estate and medicine and understanding that real estate has certain medical laws as well as merit medical laws, which are applied to where a doctor can participate. So it's kind of like I was brought into an understanding of how medicine and real estate both work and to each of their individual legal jargon, which at that point in like early 2008, they're moving out to California. I took an investment in all these different marijuana dispensaries and made a few investments and found that the biggest thing we were doing was really turning down patients that were walking into what they thought was a commercialized retail business. And I found out that they actually needed to have a medical marijuana card. We at that point noticed that a lot of these clinics were popping up in commercial locations, which would violate real estate laws. And in 2008, we started doing the online research to understand how we could create the digital footprint that would own the content on the basis of how states would create a funnel, allowing people with, you know, rules, laws, regulations and then the conditions that the various states would allow. After we kind of stabilized the search engine optimization and the keywords and phrases which people were working looking for, number one obviously being how to find a marijuana doctor, hence the name of the company we decided to launch MarijuanaDoctors.com. And as a resolution to the industry, we worked with many companies in the beginning in California and Colorado, and now we had doctors operating in every single state in America.
Chris Snyder [00:04:23] So that's a super interesting background. So your father's a doctor, your grandfather's a commercial real estate investor, tycoon, you know, obviously a very accomplished individual. And you grew up watching these two entrepreneurs. Probably I mean, a doctor is a little bit different than a little business entrepreneur, but it sounds like you melted these together. Furthermore, you did it in 2008, which we all know - middle of the financial crisis. Right. Tell me a little bit about that, because now we're gonna get into the tough time of COVID-19. But tell us a little bit about the experience you have with getting through that and how maybe that's relatable to this.
Jason Draizin [00:05:16] I was fortunate enough coming from, you know, managing my family's real estate and understanding a business that became quite successful while other businesses were failing. Assisted living really took off to the baby boomer generation. And in understanding what it actually meant to become a caregiver, it became very clear and understood online. This was also the beginning of the Internet. So we didn't have many of the availabilities of the technologies today. Medicinals, particularly at a dot net. And it was pretty understood as the streamline of approach that if we were to create all the services that a doctor would need to participate in this industry, it was almost the economic decline that you're discussing that forced doctors as well as, you know, decreased health care reimbursements and extremely lower copay under Medicare and Medicaid. That forced doctors to look for ancillary opportunities to have a cash run business. That was really the explosion of medical marijuana. And what drove physicians, I believe it wasn't only a matter of whether or not that it was really timing. It was a time that, you know, just like, you know, Uber and AirBnB, had the perfect timing. Well, this was almost a perfect storm to physicians where they couldn't depend on a lot of the things that they learned in college to keep their practices afloat. We're looking for uninsured ancillary items to maintain, especially solo practitioners.
Chris Snyder [00:06:43] And then you immediately saw potentially you'll have to - you're an expert on this. So you immediately saw potentially the conflict of being able to provide, I guess, these substances at the actual geographic point. There might be some real estate laws that you saw that needed to be overcome. We had online, you know, what you described as dot net online becoming more popular.
Jason Draizin [00:07:08] In addition to the real estate laws you're discussing, there were real laws that reside around, you know, HIPPA compliance. The protection of the American Patient records were first PHI data. Doctors have to make sure that they were adhering to both stark laws and that they weren't medically steering or pharmaceutically pushing someone. So dispensaries and doctors aren't really allowed to have a relationship in the real world. Very similar to if you went to get an MRI from your orthopedist. The orthopedist couldn't own a stake in the MRI imaging center because he would basically be giving you a prescription and forcing you to go to, you know, take a test. That's probably the highest reimbursement from insurance. That's the largest digital filed storage. So they never wanted doctors to involved with medicine in the steering of the medicine. The pharmaceutical industry was banned from leveraging and influencing doctors to prescribe one medication or the other, which really created a vast opportunity for us to become a marketplace and to fill the needs of doctors and patients to help educate them as to the next possible step, whereas most companies would view it as spam. People were so confused because these laws are very different, state and federal, where the ambiguous confusion begins, we were able to help create an educational understanding and streamline the patients to get the products and the resources and recommendations that they needed to partake in the industry.
Chris Snyder [00:08:38] Got it in. To be clear, your philosophy or your thesis is this should happen 100 percent online, correct?
Jason Draizin [00:08:49] In the beginning, we do believe that there are definitely certain scenarios where a doctor would probably be best off examining someone in person for the overall best set of medication, but especially with BE and social distancing. If a state outlaws it, there are certain conditions that a prior best medical record from a specialist can identify. There is no reason to involve the interactions that could cause for any type of liability or exposure to something that could harm someone. So I think that telemedicine has always been something that we do. Doctors are able to perform, tele-medically heart surgeries from Indian to America. So it's definitely something that we're seeing growing, but especially with medical marijuana and social distancing. I think now you have the opportunity to streamline the services of online ordering in-store or curbside pickup as well as deliveries. And there's quite a bit of infrastructure.
A lot of it, both dispensaries and doctors had to put up a large amount of their own money is to invest in this industry, especially in the states east of Colorado, which. Deemed to be vertically integrated, so there's a large cost measure. So if they're going to create an easement for the last quarter to allow for an essential business, I think it would be very hard to take it away from those businesses. And if you're looking combating the black market, a lot of these streamline services have given our patients it, you know, the adaptation and the feeling that now they can do things almost like they could if they were on Amazon Prime.
Chris Snyder [00:10:24] Got it. It's a quality product delivered by a known unknown marketplace that's been vetted. Let's take a step back and talk a little bit about just in case our audience doesn't understand, what is the real problem that Marijuana Doctors solves relative to maybe traditional medicine. Right. Forget telemedicine for a second. Talk to us a little bit about, OK. I've got issues, health issues. What kinds of issues are those? When should folks think about doing medical marijuana relative to be getting the biggest obstacle in the beginning of the company?
Jason Draizin [00:11:02] The biggest obstacle is actually educating patients about the laws and conditions. Most people don't even know that medical marijuana is available to their state unless there was such a ruckus created due to recreation. So it's actually the biggest problem is teaching people what they need to know about medical marijuana. If they qualify the state that they're in, that used to be the biggest problem after recreation. And this, like we've seen these services streamlined. And the more services that are really brought to the patients, the more they have, in addition to being a patient-focused, friendly service. We also break down every bit of the services that a doctor needs from a marketing funnel to a server, full-service suite of HIPPA compliant tools that a doctor can manage his entire practice from. We give them dedicated digital phone numbers in order to track them daily, weekly and monthly reporting, where we're able to analyze the time for a phone call to explain to them the data that we believe that phone calls under a certain amount of time need to be re gotten in touch with. Because you couldn't actually book an appointment that quickly with getting the medical records and having a conversation. That's extremely important. When we look at, you know, 80 percent of all searches are done on mobile devices these days. Asking someone in a mobile device to fill out a request form is a lot harder than giving them a digital phone number while still providing the tracking of a full service. Scheduling CRM software with automated were pointed reminders to the patients and doctors. Text, email, and voice drops, which would also sink to their Google calendar and send push notifications back and forth. Yet the mobile apps, we give them the ability to store their patients' medical records at a free EMR and the ability to create soap nodes which, you know, create the memorandum of understanding of what went on during the appointments so they can judge the overall patient's success month after month. And we actually that mine that data for them into commercialized contracts that showed the percentage yields of the individuals getting better as well as you can search by gender, insurance, ailment, condition and see how the overall people are doing with taking medical marijuana. And then you can break down into certain of the products in which they're taking.
Chris Snyder [00:13:34] So you're really providing an enabling a full suite of products and they're incremental to the practice. Right. If the practice does X, Y, Z, you guys are coming in with a full suite of products along with the supply chain and saying, hey, look, this is a resource you guys can use. And here's the whole setup. Soup to nuts.
Jason Draizin [00:14:02] Oh, absolutely. I mean, we even include, like, you know, a free upgrade to every single Web browser. Now, for our telemedicine services that they can use on their own, most of the people who are deemed the other large franchised medical marijuana businesses that have different recommendations, more marijuana doctors offices in different states. They're typically our largest advertiser is they never made the investments into content optimization and the typical means of digital marketing. So we do that on behalf of all of them and give them preferential treatment, you know, much like Google. There's different tiers that people can pay for the online exposure, which they're looking for.
Chris Snyder [00:14:47] Got it. So when this so when covered here and everything went down, give me a sense of how strong your business was prior to this and how strong it is now. I mean, it feels like you'd probably be on the right side of this. Right. But give me a sense of where you guys are relative to where you were before COVID.
Jason Draizin [00:15:12] Prior to COVID-19, doctor reputation was a little bit tricky in that there's so many advertising restrictions that were put onto the industry that many people just didn't know what was available to them after COVID-19, and kind of found that. Wow. We used to... there's...first of all, there's hope in the industry as a general. There's been a consolidation of dispensaries which created they created a little bit of a problem in getting to because they were so vertically integrated and had such large masses. They really ran out of budgets. They didn't understand. They were actually, you know, sort of advertising to. So I would say that we were really lucky once it was called in essential business that we pivoted a lot of what we were looking at, realizing that sales and doctors were very hard to get in touch with. It's really interesting that while telemedicine exploded. If you actually wanted to get in touch with the doctor, we found that people were no longer answering their phones but scheduling appointments via email. So it's kind of crazy to see that as one technology explodes. People are still like dialing in to actually set their appointments via email, even though they can see why doctors on demand. So we've seen a little bit of a catch up within that space. But there's been a lot of key indicators for us which have really changed. We put a strong concentration into content, social media, PR outreach into, you know, online communities, something we would refer to as, you know, weaponized content in email marketing to drive certain people where we knew that the competitive landscape had actually changed. So one of the things was exciting to us is that all the advertisers that kind of came in a perfect storm. Besides, before COVID-19, you had to Google medical update that occurred this year. And after COVID-19, traditional means of marketing from billboards, print magazines, and newspapers are no longer really being trafficked. So people now understand what it means to have a digital footprint. They've really reached out to a lot more marketers to understand that the level of content, keywords, title tags, and that it's not just a one and done sort of thing, it's a constant, continual thing. So I think a lot of the advertisers who took advantage of the fact that we were able to rank them quickly and get them to the top of their searches and do good business for them, didn't realize that it was actually those backlinks and the strategies and content put in place by larger venues that they were the de-facto beneficiary of that hard work and doing their own seems almost now that they're lost into really lost in translation. I mean, if you're not one of the biggest and the best, 30 percent of all searches got lost due to COVID. So now it's very hard for them to conduct business. Now, the thing that we were able to do, luckily, we really like the CBD space. We thought the CBD was something to put to a doctor's hand, not necessarily a gas station or a smoke shop, especially in taken in conjunction with other medications. You never really want to take anything with that doctor fully understanding the medication. You've done an easy example. You don't necessarily need to go to a plastic surgeon for Botox. But if you go to a nail salon and something happens, the doctor, the OAH doesn't exactly know what to do and to give you. If he doesn't know, you know, the formulation that went into your face that caused a problem. So it is better to have the doctors have an understanding and after it we have very, very strong negotiations so that we could create a consignment model so that doctors could make more per hour and institute CBD, which is cheaper than the dispensary CBD. But, you know, also to put that much like Viagra and vitamins in the hands of the doctors, if they're really using this as a means to help them have returned patients coming to them like, you know, vitamin sales and to understand them as an overall health care provider to them per primary, as well as to try and make back a quarter of business that they've all lost to do these lockdowns.
Chris Snyder [00:19:27] Yeah. So we're talking about, potentially or for real, elective types of procedures. Right. And those folks have a business that if it's deemed non-essential, you basically are not going to the doctor. So you've got, you know, doctors, you've got lawyers, you've got folks that are probably used to making a good amount of money. Now completely out of commission and marijuana, doctors steps in and says, look, we have at least something that you guys can pin on. It's all online. It's all telehealth. It's all telemedicine. And that's I mean, that's got to be an unbelievable sales pitch for them, right?
Jason Draizin [00:20:09] Doctors are actually loving it. Like what we've heard from some of the doctors that would be quite surprising is being that they're, you know, well decorated, highly educated and, you know, they're different multiple doctrines. And, you know, they're complaining that their business is or their surgeries were not essential. So they can't go to their do their hospital hours and that a lot of the nurses were paid to perform the tasks that they were doing. So they were really just sitting at home trying to figure out how they were going to manage their offices once they reopened, especially if they had to have limited people in social distancing. So the option of doing telemedicine and being involved in a new business was very exciting to them, especially when you can compound multitudes of their services. So when doctors realized they wanted to do online and reputation management online for better exposure, we reached out on behalf of them corporately. We created partnerships with companies like doctor.com. So that we could take advantage of showing him how to own their own Google listing to localize their search and even build a subdomain to our original site, claim their Google listing under the subdomain, and then would go through massive medical directories to give them 12 backlinks from a Web M.D. down to a Marijuana Doctors at a 55. And, you know, showing doctors that we would outrank their own individualized WordPress Web sites overnight with, you know, a very powerful website that could start dictating and driving traffic and controlling the reputation. So that was one of the biggest things that we found in the physicians wanted. And then in dispensaries, we were able to just leverage a new partnership with a blockchain company that's been very successful in the rice and biodiesel industry, as well as spoiled fruits for Wal-Mart. And we've now adopted and we're gonna be offering that technology for free for dispensaries so that they can handle curbside pickups, online ordering and then deliveries. The technology works perfectly. We're going to offer it to them at limited SKUs because we feel that patients get kind of lost in their searching when there is unlimited SKUs. But that's also really the advantage of medical marijuana as opposed to recreational marijuana.
Chris Snyder [00:22:24] So that's a real interesting pivot - you basically took, I don't know, 10 or 12 years of your experience in online. And you said, look, not only are we gonna help you guys with an incremental product, we're also going to help you guys with SEO. That's I mean, that happened.
Jason Draizin [00:22:42] Search engine optimization, brand management. I mean, we basically took over all the functionalities that they needed us to do and provided them every service and cool tool they needed. Doctors even come back to us now asking them to provide the PPE products from masks to sanitary products. You know, they looked as much like their pharmaceutical reps to guide them through, you know, tough times where they don't understand their business. And as they're creating more patients, it's just not obvious for Aido entry into the dispensary marketplace because we actually identify the perfect targeted patient for them. Yeah. This somebody with a card can buy their product.
Chris Snyder [00:23:22] So this is super creative. This is a very interesting and creative way to turn, you know, what looks on the surface as a tragedy and everybody just pack up shop and go home. You guys have figured out a way to leverage your skills, your expertise not only in the marijuana business, but you also thought about what else you were good at. Right. And you're passing that through. And so do you. This is interesting. So do you now run a network or basically have an agency that has a network focused on, you know, you know, physicians groups or how does that how does that look for you internally?
Jason Draizin [00:24:03] Yeah. You know, model our physicians range from accounts that pay us for a standardized listing fee of $300 to a $10,000 account that wants advanced placement and marketing to someone who turns around and then once reputation management, their own websites being developed, you know, marketing and SEO tools and tactics for the keywords and things and how they can interrelate. Backlink with us. So we've segmented into that and also brought on advertisers for direct advertisers, you know, every doctor that wanted to do telemedicine, that he felt the need to have a B2C site where he could sell products to the patients, even though he'd never done that before. So we had to make arrangements with fulfillment centers that we're willing to take under the B2C where doctors could send their patients to dissect the sites, where they could put it to the physician's name to receive a 20 percent discount. And that would, you know, intact either a cookie or a pixel tracking so that they could get affiliated. Yeah. That's on the product. So we've really built an entire digital marketplace for these physicians without necessarily the need to layout massive overhead at all.
Chris Snyder [00:25:19] And this is this all happening on marijuana, doctors, dot com, all the things you're talking about. Are there retail and brand sites that, like the doctors have, for example?
Jason Draizin [00:25:32] Some say certain doctors have their own e-commerce sites, but everything ultimately interlinks to the exact same process. So it's all been built out, internalized for an enterprise value.
Chris Snyder [00:25:42] That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, you guys certainly do a lot. A whole lot. So where do you see the organization? Marijuana, Doctors, dot.com? Where do you see the organization focused as a primary? As we slowly start to open up America. Right. Where do you like where do you see the capture of opportunity here? And where are you guys headed when this thing is over?
Jason Draizin [00:26:09] Marijuana Doctors was always creative. Even in 2008. We worked with certain mentors of the company and attorney generals to understand a forensic historical accounting level of what it means to take a product which was once deemed illegal, tax it, sell it and put it into an FDA insured bank account. And, you know, forensically, that's never changed if you look at it from an accounting and historical standpoint. Only once with tobacco. And that was really because the doctors lied. So we believe that know now that medical marijuana, unlike recreational marijuana and that seems a little confusing. But the original Los Angeles dispensaries were filed under a hardship for medical marijuana purposes. And because they paid so many state taxes, the state of California decided to give them the first option to convert to recreational shops, hence why they've been deemed an essential business, because there would be no medical marijuana left in L.A. That's not true in the rest of the country. Which raises the greater question that if medical marijuana has no according to the FDA and the DEA, no medical relevance, then why is it said is schedule one narcotic with the other drugs, whereas cocaine and heroin do have a medical reality as an opiate or as a something to stop the blood into? It is an anesthetic. So now medical marijuana, in our opinion, they should really push use coded and understanding it was essential business to change the scheduling and changing the scheduling of medical marijuana changes the entire platform. It allows the government to stand behind the decision where a clinical trial between two to six years, which could buy an entire presidency. It could you know, if you look at the states within enacted on an electoral vote, medical marijuana could sway an electoral vote without necessarily having it have a federal opinion made on what the recreational rules and obligations should fall under, whereas medical marijuana would then be viewed where they could produce it to a schedule two, three or a lesser narcotic. But what they would really begin to do is to mandate the number of return visits that a patient had to stay in with the doctor in order for their insurances to both pick up the actual appointment with the physician and pay for the medical service performed, as well as the medical prescriptive recommendation or medicine provided to the patient through a IDC or CBT code. And when you look at recreational marijuana, as you know, would you like to pay 3.4% on your American Express card or would you like to pay a copay and write off your medicine on your insurance? I think most people are going to want to, you know, find marijuana through their insurance. It also then starts to raise very interesting questions about how certain states have created for the allotment of recreational marijuana or preexistent be taxed medication, which is kind of constitutionally illegal. One of the things that makes America great is that we don't tax medication to our patients. So there seems to be a Catch-22. And a lot of these things know the future of a manufacturing facility. A manufacturing facility has the right to manufacture marijuana as a Schedule one narcotic, which is usually licensed and reserved for compounding pharmacies. No different than dispensaries are not really. If you look in Colorado where they have medical and recreational and the same store without security protocols to protect that Peachoid data. They're not truly setup with the real estate, zoning and medical zoning of, say, you know, CVS and a Duane Reade. So, while those businesses may have to make some modifications and changes. I think that on the medical side of the industry, we're really going to streamline it. You know, while people in the mom and pop side fear the pharmaceutical industry and GW Pharma and some of those companies starting to grow stake, they also make the medicine in the delivery mechanisms cleaner, safer and more understood in order for us to study and ultimately yield outcomes that will hopefully have the need for people to no longer need, you know, marijuana to subsidize, you know, pain reeling from an ailment, but really to a condition that's causing the ailment, the pain and the need for another scheduled narcotic.
Chris Snyder [00:30:36] Do you see Big Pharma getting into this? I mean, part my naivete, but maybe they already are. I mean, I can see these guys, you know, jumping right in as soon as the water's nice and warm on the backs of a lot of hard work that you've probably already done to get us here. Right.
Jason Draizin [00:30:52] I think not only they're in it, I think that a lot of initial mistakes that are going be done by a lot of companies is not paying respect that royalty pharma owns a lot of these delivery mechanisms. And while they haven't said "boo hoo" today, they know very well may come after the companies for violating their very patents and delivery mechanisms, which were kind of being shortsighted and, you know, not really referred to as real in today's day and age. But at a time where the federal government lessens its view on medical marijuana, I believe that the pharmaceutical companies of GW and APA dialects has tons more drugs coming through the pipeline where they have gone through clinical trials. So, you know, I think it's both a race to the top and to the bottom. I think that we know very little about medical marijuana and how it actually works within individuals. And, you know, I'm kind of excited to, you know, put it into the more professional hands that actually have the money so that people can no longer excuse the expression, throwing shit against the wall, but really understanding what cannabinoid is going to help the endocannabinoid system that is their body that will hopefully yield to a molecular homeostasis. So they step to prevention of diseases, you know, in themselves internally, which I think is the best thing, medical marijuana. The hope of cannabinoids and endocannabinoids can really bring together.
Chris Snyder [00:32:18] And you can get that without getting high. Right. And the reason why in probably I don't know, maybe I can just ask you this question. The reason why there hasn't been more research done and we haven't leaned in on this is this because candidly, it's because it's been illegal. Right.
Jason Draizin [00:32:36] Due to the scheduling, the FDA, the DEA were never really allowed to test for positive results. They were only really let's test for negative results as it was reviewed, too, as a drug. So we really have very limited access. And it's kind of sad when you realize that, you know, we're really researching to Israel and Canada and places that have changed the scheduling and we've seen them. Do, you know, unbelievable advances in the medication? I think that as a world leader, a lot of countries are afraid to come out against America and say that, you know, their rulings and dealing with their scheduling, saying that there's no medicinal value is wrong. And I think that after this has been changed to the central business, I think that's the greatest opportunity for medical marijuana. If you look at Massachusetts, they shut down IREX, your stores and, you know, everybody went to medical marijuana and we saw four hundred and fifty percent increase of appointments set to our Massachusetts stores, which were, you know, not doing as well before with their medical marijuana as they were with recreational marijuana. That's completely turned upside down, which was very exciting for a company off the top of your head.
Chris Snyder [00:33:41] You know how many states are playing the medical marijuana and also the recreational marijuana game?
Jason Draizin [00:33:48] Sure. I think there's 35 states with medical marijuana laws in place around ten or eleven that have reg laws. So one of the earlier questions that we spoke about was certain states are on a to-be-determined basis. Florida probably has the hardest time readapting renewals or telemedicine, although we do expect them to do an extension. But Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, and Arkansas have all instituted have instituted telemedicine laws, curbside pickup, online ordering, and delivery. So those are really all the medical marijuana states which have taken the adaptations that failed in California and streamline them through a medical marijuana marketplace. And those stores are all doing very successful in those states. So it looks very promising for the future that they're going to continue to allow this to be a real online business.
We've worked at certain security settings like uploading your driver's license and your marijuana card, where in the event that you don't, we can save your shopping cart and streamline you over to a telemedicine doctor who can, depending on the state laws. Now, if their department health is down or not, write you a handwritten recommendation or you can use one of the ones generated from a free telemedicine channel. But they're making a lot of exceptions to get people their medications so they're not inconvenienced and uncomfortable in times that are already kind of inconveniencing and uncomfortable.
Chris Snyder [00:35:18] So know regarding your stake in the market, in the overall marketplace. Marijuana Doctors, dot com. It feels like you're saying you're at the very beginning of this thing. You guys are already quite large, you been at it for a long time. You've got great tech. You've got a great team. You've got a great client base. You've got a good market place. But it feels like what you're saying is you're kind of at the beginning of this thing as it relates to opportunity from a market penetration standpoint.
Jason Draizin [00:35:49] We feel like a lot of Internet companies where, you know, coming around the beginning of the 11th year, you know, 10 years is sort of like an overnight success where we finally see that if all of this continues being streamlined, every page as it relates to the judiciary element can ultimately act as an independent marketplace that drives know which one of these products is really best set to the elements so that we can really serve people the proper elements under the searches that they're looking for and then expand their research and knowledge base and understanding of which one of those products they would like the most on a basis of, you know, how they began their search rather than, you know, pushing them through a funnel and giving them the best of. Now, we think that, you know, in the future to come, we're going to go to identify exactly what they needed, you know, whether it was COVID or not. I think that COVID forced medical marijuana into the space and deemed it an essential business probably will make them revisit the scheduling and especially, you know, with your political opinion. But if the incumbent wins, this is a very easy decision for him to make, to not have to make decisions and leave it for the next guy, which is very much the political history. If you look at Governor Christie, who he put in charge of the opiate epidemic. He hated marijuana and he stipulated that he would invite the DEA to come into his state and arrest most citizens and doctors participating. But Korzen really made the ticket and signed it his last day in office, and Governor Christie was forced to deal with it. So, you know, I think Donald Trump brought him on as part of his cabinet because he didn't want to see history repeat itself and to really understand someone who understands digital marketing the way he ran his first campaign. I don't think he's going to be ignorant to the understanding of the amount of electoral votes won due to the states that have enacted medical marijuana laws, which just by default means that the popular vote has already come out to overturn the federal opinion. So you clearly state what the statespeople want. If the electoral governors and mayors are to vote on those opinions, then popular opinion is pretty much in state. And I think you do have enough electoral votes just on this one decision to sway an election.
Chris Snyder [00:37:57] And to be clear, you probably have more specific dates than I do. But this, you know, rec recreational and I believe what you suggested a little bit earlier on is the recreational component has actually helped the medical component. But the recreational component or legislation state by state, relatively new. Right? Two years, three years. Four years. How long have we had the recreational laws on the pants?
Jason Draizin [00:38:23] Correct. And now they were really put on hold. You know, I think that was a big shock to everybody seeing the federal government decide that medical marijuana was essential, whereas recreational was not. I think that presents the largest opportunity for this industry group, really from my side of the industry in medicine. But I think it's a fool's errand to consider recreational product and medical products in the understandings that need to go into how those products are described and explain to dosed by patients extremely differently.
So I think that, you know, this is really always been used as a medicine. So I think you're going to know I don't think recreational marijuana is doomed. I think much like you're going to get through it. But I think the medical marijuana will be viewed very, very differently.
Probably have to, you know, a few different lifestyles. As you know, the industry continues to evolve.
Chris Snyder [00:39:15] Got it. Got it. Well, I know what. What do you think? How long do you think it takes? I mean, obviously, we run an advertising agency. You guys have done a great job of marketing and advertising along with a great product. You've built a lot of nice things there. When do you think it's going to be feasible to advertise this on, you know, places like Google or Facebook or God forbid, Amazon starts allowing, you know, CBD and things of that nature? What's your over-under on that one.
Jason Draizin [00:39:47] Right now, from, you know, from trying to run my own marketplace and using third party companies and partnerships to really alleviate myself from certain reseller liabilities that I don't know where they end right now. So as an organization, we've decided to it. But areas that we feel confident in and how we want to merge our partnerships and relationships in the future.
I think it's all up for grabs. I think it depends on how you want to articulate and enter the marketplace with your product. I think medically there's the path of least resistance recreationally. I think in certain markets need to mature to understand what the realities were, I think the medical industry and the medical side of medical marijuana has between both in Google and other services, is taking a beating and really forced to become mature. Whereas recreational marijuana really has an ad to do it. So we still don't have all those necessarily avenues open to us in terms of Google and Facebook advertising. I think as soon as that is opened up, your larger players and ad agencies, much like mine, we'll do metro cooperative advertising. And, you know, it's going to unfairly increase the budget size and the difference between the large and the small businesses making people opt into networks to become part of, you know, really what the individual could no longer do on its own.
Chris Snyder [00:41:18] Yeah. Got it. So, you know, we're coming up on the end here. But you know what I'd like to get from you if you could just give me one or two or three things that you believe helps you get through. You know, I had a guest on a little bit earlier and I said, hey, is it perseverance? Is it luck? Is it? And the one thing that he mentioned was he loves to make mistakes because he learns from them. So if you can help our audience try to figure out, hey, what do you believe is the one or two things that have gotten you to where you are today and how you're going to move forward?
Jason Draizin [00:41:55] We love solving problems. And this is an industry with a lot of problems, you know, whether you want to be compassionate to someone who is living a horrible, uncomfortable life and want you to help them make an easement. So even our customer service, which is the lowest level position in our firm, there's a grandiose feeling of accomplishment in knowing that every day you actually help someone improve their life. And on the other end, you know, we're really dealing with complicated problems of telling doctors how they can, you know, launch merchant processors and engage in an industry where it's almost it's humorous that, you know, now doctors and individual entrepreneurs and so proprietors are now coming to us to help us navigate them through the problems that we've dealt with with the last 10 years. So we're kind of just reviewing our history and offering them solutions. I think probably one of the best aspects of our customer relationship and how we have a lifetime value with our physicians is we're probably more educated into the topic matter than their doc and then their lawyers are. So they literally come test for every single thing.
And as a digital marketer, there's not that much different that we do, whether it's for the space of medical marijuana or any other business besides maybe the initial studies and understandings to the terms and competencies of that particular industry and set back. So it's very easy for us, especially something that we've been solely focused on for 10 years to help others with their problems, which, while large to them or not as large as the ones we may see coming that we're currently trying to navigate and get in front of. So everything behind us seems very easy to replicate hands out to our physician networks. That's really why they keep paying this month after month.
Chris Snyder [00:43:43] Yeah, that's great. That's great advice. I mean, solving problems is is a very human thing. I think a lot of us like to do it, especially if you're in a business like ours and yours. You've picked a fight. You picked the tough one. There's a lot of opportunity, but there's a lot of tricky things that you have to overcome. So being a problem solver is exactly what you need to be, you know, not only during the COVID crisis but also with, you know, being an entrepreneur and also being an entrepreneur in the, you know, the medical marijuana industry. So I'm going to close it at that. Everyone, Jason Draizin, CEO and founder of Marijuana Doctors, they provided online gateway designed to connect physician physicians with patients who are interested in pursuing medical marijuana cards. They've helped out tons of people. Jason, I wish you all the best of luck and we'll see you again soon. Thanks so much. Have a good day. All right, Jason.
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