Is Roundup Weedkiller In Your Marijuana? Yes. Maybe. Dunno.

As the cannabis green rush sweeps the country, tests for contaminants reveal shocking results.

As of Tuesday, two California juries have found that Monsanto’s marquee herbicide, Roundup weedkiller, was a factor in causing cancer in individuals who used or worked with it. Last month researchers at the University of Washington reported a study that found the principal ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, raises the cancer risk for those exposed to it by 41%.

For decades Roundup has been liberally sprayed on crops, gardens, and lawns around the world. It can be completely harmless on some crops, but now that the cannabis green rush is sweeping the country, leading states Colorado and California are requiring that all legal marijuana products be tested for contaminants, including pesticides. The early results have been shocking.

The California Bureau of Cannabis Control reported in January that of licensed lab tests of 31,000 cannabis batches, one in eight flunked state guidelines. Of the failures, 40 percent were due to pesticide contamination. The rest were tainted with microbial impurities such as mold and residual solvents like ethanol.

Furthermore, gaps are showing up in the oversight of testing labs. Malfunctioning equipment caused such a backup at one facility, Sequoia Analytical Labs of Sacramento, that the director let several hundreds batches go out untested with false reports showing they’d passed. The state has since shut the lab down.

Cannabis contamination is the emerging industry’s dirty little secret that isn’t so secret anymore, and not so little, either. That there are traces of pesticides showing up in legal weed is disturbing. Marijuana doesn’t get washed before going to market the way vegetables are. It has no skin to be peeled. No one yet knows the risks of repeatedly inhaling smoke that may contain herbicides and pesticides.

More alarming is the fact that legal cannabis is a small slice of the total US market. There are tens of thousands of small and medium-sized illegal “grows” in California and Oregon alone. Some outlaw growers have voluntarily switched to non-toxic pesticides, but less conscientious farmers avoid the premium prices those products command, instead using cheaper products made with potentially hazardous ingredients.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture reported in 2018 that the state produced as much as 15.5 million pounds of cannabis but consumed only 2.5 million pounds. The extra 13 million pounds? Smuggled east, untested, and sold on the black market. In 2016, then Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom put the percentage of California production that ends up on the black market at 85 to 90 percent. Nobody knows how much of it was contaminated, or with what.

“This is an under-reported problem that is destined to bloom into a national public health issue,” says Matthew A. Mills, president and chief operating officer of Med-X Inc. The Los Angeles-based company manufactures a line of pesticides under the Nature-Cide brand that are made with essential oils and approved by state officials in Colorado and elsewhere as safe for use on marijuana crops.

In a piece recently published by Culture Magazine, a news site owned by High Times, Mills wrote, “The relative rigor brought to consumer safety by the California Bureau of Cannabis Control is something to cheer about. But it highlights the enormity of the problem. Until cannabis is fully legal and federally regulated, the job of consumer protection falls on the states, most of which are just beginning to get up to speed.”

Mills noted that there have also been growing reports that an unknown percentage of Chinese-made vape pens that have flooded the market are made with lead that leaches in the cannabis product. K Street Consulting, an industry vendor, recently told Marijuana Business Daily that one of the firm’s clients had its inventory of cartridges tested by an agriculture lab instead of a cannabis lab and found “actionable levels of lead” in 90 percent.

There is a rich vein of irony running through this issue. For half a century and longer, Americans have been smoking marijuana, concerned mainly with whether there were any seeds or stems in it. Now, says Mills, “All the attention being paid to making sure cannabis is clean may prove to be the catalyst that leads to more and better testing of the agricultural products we consume as well.”