People buying cannabis in the US face a shortage of illegal weed
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“You’re not gonna keel over if you buy some cheap suspect weed,” said Mitchell. Someone who was smoking cleaner weed probably won’t have a lung problem 10 years down the road.
He can walk to the dispensary but he has to take his car and go to a place that has marijuana that he trusts. It is a privilege to have deep knowledge of the industry.
Mitchell said, “People assume it’s safe because of the guardrails that are in place by state enforcement.” I think that is up for debate when you look at the end result.
He makes products under the names Ript and Ripple in Colorado and has become increasingly concerned about the lack of enforcement of the industry and the safety of the marijuana supply.
Experts say criminal cannabis sellers wind up outcompeting licensed vendors. They don’t have to pay taxes or pay costly fees, which lowers their prices. They can also sell their product anywhere in the country, ignoring federal laws that prevent legal companies from shipping cannabis across state lines.
A breaking point came when Singer released a much cheaper product to the market, and increased sales by 500%, a spike he expected would certainly trigger an inspection from the state Marijuana Enforcement Division.
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“The kind of guy who wants an honest playing field,” Singer said. If there were no referees and a team was allowed to cheat, professional sports would not be fun. It would be very not fun to watch, to participate in.”
And Singer looked for things Colorado doesn’t require testing for, like coliform bacteria, which signals unsanitary conditions in the grow house or in storage. Four of the 15 products had coliform levels that were high. Marijuana smoking poses a risk of harmful toxicants entering the lungs and bloodstream because of chemical components of pesticides found in four of the products. He says it reminds him of the bad old days.
Colorado weed is comparable to New York street weed in 2008. In fact I think the cartels probably cared more about their consumers than a lot of people here,” said Singer. I have the data to back it up.
Last year there were many recalls across the country. In Missouri, state authorities issued recalls covering more than 132,000 marijuana products due to noncompliant lab testing and tracking. Mike Tyson’s branded cannabis flower products were recalled in California. And Maine issued its first recalls last year due to yeast and mold in pre-rolled joints and other products sold at two dozen stores.
There have been no reports of people getting sick or death from using cannabis, despite an estimated $30 billion in sales last year alone. But some in the industry and health and safety experts say the long term ramifications of smoking contaminated weed are not known, and they are urging the state to do more to protect consumers.
As the industry became well established, Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division increased its staff and started to require testing of marijuana for things like heavy metals and yeasts and molds, and set limits for the contaminants. The MED issues health and safety advisories when contaminants are found.
If we require that dog food follow this, but we don’t require that for cannabis … to follow these kind of basic food safety guidelines, then I don’t know what the industry is doing.
The director of the Marijuana Enforcement Division, Dominique Mendiola, would not comment directly on data from Ripple cofounder Justin Singer, nor on whether the supply of marijuana is safe, but said there is a robust process in place for ensuring marijuana is free of contaminants.
“We do see an ongoing need for more work to be done,” said Mendiola. “And ensure that we are reaching consumers effectively, that we are giving information that they ultimately need to determine: do they have certain products that we’ve identified as a potential threat to health and safety?”
She stated that they have changed the health and safety notice page online and will soon be distributing flyers to help educate consumers on safety issues.
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The marijuana industry is hurting because of the crash in cannabis prices after a huge investment in the area during the Pandemic Lock-up. Now businesses are closing, limiting license revenue that funds MED enforcement. She said that they are decreasing the number of their offices to cut costs.
“We have been looking at opportunities to save costs and expenses, in a way that still allows us and ensures that we’re able to carry out our regulatory obligations,” said Mendiola.
The Flower Collective’s co- founder says that Colorado’s weed is the safest in the United States. “At the end of the day there’s a lot of things Colorado’s learned that other states haven’t learned yet, and one of those, the big one’s, heavy metals.”
She said there’s some research on mold such as Aspergillus, which can cause serious medical issues in rare cases, especially for marijuana users. But there’s no data on how smoking versus vaping, for instance, affects the amount of contaminants that end up in the lungs.
Shaw noted that the rate of recalls in Colorado has slowed down after a big increase. He said that the financial struggles of the industry in Colorado means fewer producers.
“It’s hard to make judgements on if it’s right or wrong when there’s like zero data to really go into the health impacts,” said Tess Eidem, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s lab for aerobiology and disinfection.
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Cannabis growers in Colorado and other states are permitted to use irradiation technology to treat their product when it fails testing. The process is approved in food, with required labeling. She said that a grower can hit the cannabis buds with x-ray until it passes testing. The process breaks down the bond between the organisms, which means that they can die or stop growing.
In the present, products have to pass a final test. The process can be onerous, though, on growers, who are already suffering a prolonged downturn in sales prices. Stores and grows are closing.
Shaun Opie, with E4 Bioscience in Michigan, is an expert in marijuana contaminants and lab testing. The money that was sunk into the harvest means there’s a lot of pressure to market it.
Opie said it would be a good idea for states to implement a shelf surveillance testing program, to monitor the product that actually makes it to consumers.
There is a town in California called FAIRFIELD. A sergeant was on a cold morning last month. Erin McAtee watched as members of his team with the California Department of Cannabis Control executed a search warrant at a home in Fairfield, halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco.
The door of the upscale house on this street was broken open and it looked like a normal suburban house. The home was gutted and turned into a stinky mess of marijuana plants, grow lights, chemicals and pesticides.
“You can see the mold on the tarp, it’s there,” he said. “Yup, that’s mold.” His team also identified chemicals and pesticides not approved in the U.S. for use with consumer products like legal cannabis.
He told NPR that their undercovers buy cannabis from people who aren’t real. “They will tell you that everything they’re doing is legit, and that they have a license.”
Everyone interviewed for this project by NPR said that it will get easier for people to buy and use marijuana over time. Most pointed to the fact that America has gone through this kind of transition before with another popular consumer product: alcohol.
Paul Armentano said the market for marijuana lacks transparency and accountability. He said any time a consumer product is being sold without proper regulation, it’s risky.
I’d be worried about all sorts of issues even if I was getting cannabis, alcohol or my broccoli from an entirely unregulated market.
So far, the opposite has happened. Vanda Felbab-Brown, who studies criminal drug markets for the Brookings Institution, said regulated cannabis producers often compete with a growing network of criminal gangs often rooted in mainland China.
“These illegal cannabis cultivation plantations are used by the Chinese criminal groups for laundering money, but there is also increasingly an intertwining with human smuggling of Chinese people into the U.S. that go through some of those networks. They wind up in fact being enslaved at the plantations,” she said.
Alcohol prohibition was repealed in December 1933, but many states kept liquor bans on the books into the 1950s, creating the same kind of patchwork we now see with marijuana laws. For a long time liquor bootleggers and smugglers continued to operate.
It takes time when you move from prohibition to legalization, said Beau Kilmer who is an expert on marijuana markets and co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center.
After legalization, the states will spend a few years coming up with a licensing regime and figuring out what the regulations are and issuing licenses, but they haven’t focused on what to do about the illegal market. In many places, enforcement has not been the top priority.
In Fairfield, Sgt. McAtee watched as a truck backed up to another illegal grow house, preparing to haul away a big crop of seized cannabis. He said that the crop could have ended up on store shelves.
“Many of the places we hit are shipping their cannabis out of state, where you can make ten-fold your profit in California,” he said.
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