When recreational cannabis is legalized in a given state, one of the reasons often cited for why buying from a legal dispensary is better than an illegal or gray-market one has to do with regulation. Buy from a legal seller, the thinking goes, and what you buy there will be of the best quality, with detailed lists of ingredients and a sense that everything is above board. Unfortunately, a recent investigation conducted by the Los Angeles Times and industry publication WeedWeek turned up something else in legal weed: traces of pesticides.
That’s the big takeaway from a Los Angeles Times article by Paige St. John and Alex Halperin. The investigators tested a host of products and found — largely in vapes — an array of pesticides. As the Times reports, these include the likes of Chlorfenapyr (which can cause vomiting, headaches and memory loss) and Trifloxystrobin (which can cause dizziness and irritated eyes). Lab testing revealed the presence of 45 different toxic chemicals in the cannabis products analyzed.
The investigation focused on vapes and pre-rolls, with 25 out of the 42 products tested containing, as St. John and Halperin describe it, “concentrations of pesticides either above levels the state allows or at levels that exceed federal standards for tobacco.”
Legal Cannabis Hasn’t Ended the Illegal Sale of Weed in California
Markets for legal and illegal weed can coexistThe situation described in the Times report sounds not unlike what’s been happening in Colorado’s legal weed market lately. In both cases, laws that were comprehensive when they were first enacted are no longer adequate to regulating the products made available to consumers. St. John and Halperin point out that smokable products are at particular risk here in part because of how they’re consumed, which could put people more at risk from pesticides.
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