Milligrams, Not Percentages - Unscripted Cannabis

Guest: Mark Gillilan, founder and CEO of Kyoto Botanicals · Host: Just J (Mr Gudwudz) · Unscripted Cannabis

Mark Gillilan founded Kyoto Botanicals, a family-owned business since 2020 making THC-free CBD and functional mushroom products — lion’s mane, reishi, cordyceps, chaga, and, as he is quick to clarify, “not psilocybin containing mushrooms.”

The most useful thing he says on Unscripted Cannabis with host Just J is a correction to how almost every product in the category is read, and he learned it the hard way in his own kitchen.

The Percentage Does Not Matter

The origin story is a good one because it is a mistake:

“So I spent a lot of time in my kitchen taking full spectrum hemp extract, mixing it with different oils, different flavor oils, and spent, you know, like half a day doing that in my kitchen. And part way through, I started to realize that I was really high. Because even below that 0.3% THC level, that can still end up with a significant amount of milligrams of THC, which is what really matters, right? The percentage doesn’t matter. It’s the milligrams, right?” — Mark Gillilan

The arithmetic is the whole point, and he spells it out. A percentage is a ratio, not a dose. Zero point three percent of a very small thing is negligible. Zero point three percent of a large amount of extract is not.

“So if you look at like a 25 milligram full spectrum hemp CBD gummy, it can have a milligram of THC in it. If you have a higher dose CBD tincture, right, like a 2,000 milligram bottle where you’re taking, you know, 100 milligrams per serving, that can have four, five, six milligrams of…” — Mark Gillilan

Four to six milligrams is a meaningful dose for many people, arriving in a product that is legally and truthfully described as under the THC threshold. Nobody is lying. The metric is simply not answering the question the buyer is asking.

How To Actually Read A Product Label

Practitioner guidance from us. Mark explains the percentage-versus-milligrams distinction; he does not give a step-by-step label-reading method, so the steps below are ours, built on his explanation.

Three numbers, in this order:

1. Milligrams per serving, not per container. A 2,000 milligram bottle tells you about the bottle. What reaches you is the serving. Mark’s own example uses 100 milligrams per serving from a 2,000 milligram bottle — a twentieth of the headline figure.

2. Total THC in milligrams, per serving. This is the number the percentage obscures. If a label gives you only a percentage, it has not answered the question, and you may need the certificate of analysis to get there.

3. What the serving size actually is. Half a dropper, one gummy, two gummies. Everything above is per serving, so the serving definition governs all of it.

The general principle from Mark’s kitchen holds beyond labels: ratios describe products, milligrams describe doses, and it is doses that affect people.

Where Loopholes Get Exploited

Mark is even-handed about the regulatory picture, and describes the mechanism without moralising:

“People are gonna find the weak spots in regulation. People figured out that they could get THC to everybody all across the country, whether it’s through Delta 8, whether it’s through, you know, heavy loading of the product. So putting a lot of hemp extract into a product, you know, because it’s point three percent — the more hemp extract you put in, the milligrams of THC are gonna rise with it because it is a percentage, right? It’s a ratio, it’s not a hard ceiling.” — Mark Gillilan

“It’s a ratio, it’s not a hard ceiling” is the sentence that explains an entire market segment. A percentage cap does not cap anything in absolute terms — scale the product up and the absolute dose scales with it, entirely within the rule.

He supports the correction while acknowledging the cost, which is a more honest position than the industry usually offers: “Now it’s a hard ceiling, which is, you know, it’s good and bad. I both support it and understand where people are coming from… It’s needed because of THC access that was never intended.” He is also careful about the limits of his own expertise: “I’m not a regulatory, I’m not a policy expert. I don’t know where they got point four milligrams per container. I don’t know where that number came from.”

And on the wider picture: “The Delta 8, the THC explosion, all of it. I mean, it just had to be addressed. It was crazy. It was the wild west and it had unintended consequences.”

The Market Everyone Forgot

The commercial insight underneath the chemistry is that a large group of people were not being served at all:

“There’s a whole other side of the market that’s kind of been forgotten about — people that don’t want anything to do with THC: older generations, professionals, athletes.” — Mark Gillilan

And his blunt framing of the assumption behind that oversight: “Not everybody wants to get high. I mean most of the world, most of the country probably doesn’t want to get high, I would say.” He is careful to flag that he has no data for it — “maybe you have data on the percentage of people that actually smoke weed to get high. I have no idea what that number is, but it’s certainly not a majority, I would guess.”

His answer to it is education rather than marketing. He runs a YouTube channel of education-focused videos and shorts, writes the company blog himself, and works local Denver markets face to face. As he puts it, he is “big into education” — building, in Just J’s recurring phrase, from the inside out rather than the outside in.

Which connects directly to a point Paul Miller makes elsewhere on this show: the sympathetic non-consumer is a real and largely unaddressed audience.